Tag: Matthew Spencer

“wrestling words, terror at the morning gray”: Territories of the Soul / On Intonation by Wolfgang Hilbig

Ah, yes, to enter Hilbig territory, be rural or urban, is to travel a terrain that is at once suffocating and strangely comforting. With each new work to emerge in English translation it is, for an admirer of his melancholy poetics, like coming home:

—Then comes the city of S., our destination almost, laagered on the valley floor, admitting no beam of spring sunlight; it resembles, in fact, a reservoir for all the wet the clouds cast down when they’ve finally gained the surrounding heights. I would have to continue further southward, continue further southwestward, until the actual sea, I think, if I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief . . . here in this valley you remain imprisoned, unarousable, and held to the earth here by an apparently stronger local gravitation, you walk stooped through the city with its churches, descend even lower, to where the empty markets stand, assembled against a yellow prefab administrative circus, such a scene has a sundial on its dome—, but there is no sun here.
From “Adieu”

No one creates an atmosphere quite Wolfgang Hilbig.

Territories of the Soul / On Intonation, pulls together short works from two collections published in the closing years of the GDR—eight stories and two poems—translated by Matthew Spencer and published by Sublunary Editions. Hilbig was born in Meuselwitz, Thuringia in 1941, and grew up in the industrial wilderness of postwar East Germany. He began writing poetry while working as a stoker, but his literary sensibilities were never going to fit with the socialist realism the GDR wanted its working-class poets to produce. Yet, although he migrated to West Germany in 1985, his spirit and his themes tended to remain anchored in the East.

The stories in this slim volume offer a classic cast of Hilbig characters—tloners, dreamers, misfits at odds with themselves and the world around them. They are also often writers, or aspiring writers, even if their literary endeavours take place after work, or in secret on the job if possible. And the workplaces many of them are bound to, like Hilbig himself in his early adult years in the GDR, are mines and factories in set grim, urban or rural wastelands. His work can evoke an atmosphere so heavy and gritty one can almost taste it; his protagonists wander landscapes marred by sludge, refuse, and discarded armaments, their restlessness fueled by anxiety, remorse, and regret. The narrator of “Adieu,” quoted above, has just walked out on his only child, knowing he is wrong, and wondering “how does love become just a thing I rob from another, become a thing I can feel only by denying it to another.” It’s an uncomfortable monologue, made more so by the weight of the speaker’s tortured conscience.

One  of the strongest pieces here is the second title story, “On Intonation.” It opens with a chilling description of a stormy, wet night, viewed from the cockpit window of the nightwatchman’s station above an open-pit mining operation. The narrator is filling in for a missing watchman, a task he put himself up for thinking it would provide him the necessary space, away from the heat of the boiler room, to address a long pressing concern:

What I needed to work out—I had known this for years—was a kind of self-assessment, which would either certify me as a worker or as a true writer; however, since my presentiment was that I had insufficient reasons to properly continue writing, I had so far neglected this decisive memorandum; and yet I needed to fix these details in written memory, so I could exhibit them as proof against myself. —Meanwhile, I had come to a conclusion: I had to note down some urgent thoughts about the intonation of these modern lyrics . . . so I could implicate myself in evading duty.

And, yet, although he had been thinking about this question for some time, he finds himself, at his little makeshift desk, unable to find a word to replace intonation—his thoughts are frozen, he is unable to write the words he is convinced will prove he cannot write. But through this night, as he makes his rounds and struggles with his creative despair, his monologue turns on its own existential exploration of the lyric. The speaker, fearing that he lacks what he needs to be a writer, finds, in spite of himself, that he does.

This compilation, which includes work originally published in 1986 and 1990, is a particular treat for fans of Old Rendering Plant and The Tidings of the Trees—not only for its misanthropic souls, distinctive landscapes, and the occasional hint of gothic horror, but for those long winding and unwinding sentences that seem to pull the narrative into dark corners, resisting but unable to avoid a splash of milky light now and again. Even better, it may serve as the perfect introduction for those who have not yet encountered the addictive terrain of Wolfgang Hilbig.

Territories of the Soul / On Intonation by Wolfgang Hilbig is translated from the German by Matthew Spencer and published by Sublunary Editions.

Rumors, riddles and other stories: Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist

Sublunary Editions, the humble publishing venture started by Joshua Rothes in Seattle, Washington in 2019 has, over the past few years, expanded from a simple monthly newsletter featuring new works and/or translations, to a quarterly journal called Firmament, the Empyrean series of obscure/hard-to-find literary treasures, revived, researched and restored, and a growing catalogue of original and translated novellas, stories, poems and hybrid works. Best of all, the books are all small, shorter volumes easily tucked into a bag or jacket pocket to read on the go.

Their most recent offering, Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist is a perfect example of the kind of work that sets this small publisher apart. In his tragically short life, Kleist packed a lot of living—writer, dramatist, soldier, possible spy, and during his final year, newspaperman. When he died by suicide at the age of thirty-four, he left behind a profoundly influential body of work. This collection of short stories and anecdotes originally published on the pages of the Berliner Abendblätter, were written over the course of one year, between 1810 and 1811, the span of time from the daily newsheet’s inaugural issue to their author’s death. As such they represent the first extensive collection of Kleist’s short work in English translation and an important, exciting addition to the Sublunary line-up.

Born in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1777, Kleist lived during a particularly unstable era in European history. Conflict with France was the major political concern for the German states throughout his adult years, and he served in the Prussian Army, spent some time in prison, and became an early supporter of German nationalism. He would come to be known as one of the finest literary stylists of his time, but during his lifetime he realized little of that acclaim. His daily compositions for the Abendblätter, from which the pieces in Anecdotes are drawn, provide a somewhat different insight into his gift for wit, satire and social commentary. Kleist was the editor and chief contributor to this publication and, as translator Matthew Spencer notes in his Introduction, this forum shows him to be “studiously evenhanded” taking aim at his subjects from all sides. At least while he was at its helm, the paper showed great promise. But it would not last long and might well have disappeared from memory altogether if not for a fortunate circumstance:

while Kleist began, through his plays and novellas, his posthumous ascent into the literary canon, the anecdotes remained largely underread, out of print. Much of the Abendblätter would have been lost if not for the Brothers Grimm, who collected issues specifically for the anecdotes, considering them small masterpieces of vernacular literature.

Although the critical value of these stories, witticisms and anecdotes, was debated by many, future admirers like Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, found in them an inspiring comic spirit to treasure.

The works collected in this volume run from the absurd to the tragic to the ribald, and are at times, remarkably timely. Some read as historical accounts, some as mock news items, and others as entertainments. Healthy doses of sarcasm drive home subtle and not so subtle attacks on military culture and the art of war. Folk tales and fables take clever turns. A few may miss the mark (or may have not survived the distance from their original context), but most of his tales are quite funny—even if darkly so. Where a little extra background is needed, Spencer includes brief historical or linguistic footnotes.

The pieces gathered here range from very short amusing accounts, bizarre Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not type reports, to imagined news stories and, even, in one instance, a letter to the editor (crafted by Kleist himself of course) responding to a “reported” proposal for a cannonball postal delivery service. The postal system, it seems, is a an ongoing concern going back centuries. Another anecdote echoed almost a century and a half later with the play Twelve Angry Men, is “A Strange Case in England” which records the debate among a dozen jurors in a murder case but which ends with an unexpected twist.

As much as I enjoyed the anecdotes, my favourite pieces were the last two, somewhat longer stories, “A Ghostly Apparition” and “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music.” Both are more along the lines of gothic tales but demonstrate Kleist’s ability to tell a solid, entertaining story. While the original issues of the Abendblätter would have included more conventional “news” and “information”, the selection for this project was guided by literary interest. As such, Anecdotes provides either an excellent first introduction to Kleist or a welcome treat for English language readers who already know him well.

Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist is translated by Matthew Spenser and published by Sublunary Editions.