windows + birds

the bird seems to have recovered

Voyage by Dugout, The Play of the Film of the War

PAJ, the Performing Arts Journal, just published my translation of Peter Handke's play about the disintegration of the multicultural federal state of Yugoslavia under intense and falsifying media pressures.

The translation began in Vienna on the night before the premiere of the play in the Burgtheater:

5 June 1999, Vienna

Žarko,

I have checked into the Pension Falstaff, just around the corner from Sigmund Freud's rooms in the Berggaße.

From the train into town I saw a hawk hanging over a hops field lined with brilliant red poppies and blue flax. Like a sleek NATO jet over a fruitful Yugoslav landscape.

While waiting for you and Anne to arrive, I’ll work on my translation of Peter’s Voyage by Dugout, The Play of the Film of the War, whose premiere in the Burgtheater we are gathering to witness.

6 June 1999, Vienna

This afternoon I walked down to the Danube. The bridges here have not been bombed. The Danube still flows toward Belgrade. And the Serbs I meet in Vienna are dealing with their stress the same way I do: by telling jokes.

Madeline Albright gives the Serbs an ultimatum: love or war! They take one look at her and decide on war.

        Later, in the city center, I stumble onto a Sunday-evening demonstration against NATO and for Yugoslavia. "NATO – fascistik, NATO – fascistik!” the crowd of maybe 3000 chants. I donate 200 Schillings to a humanitarian group and they give me a blue, white, and red Serbian flag in return. A Vienna policeman, pistol in his belt, leans against a post studying a book with the title: Learn Greek.

Back in my room, unable to sleep, I turn to my translation. I wish you were here Žarko, to compare notes. Peter’s prose is not easy to reproduce, nor are the word-images. How, for instance, did you translate “Fertigsatzpisse”? Pissing your finished, your modular sentences? Sentential piss?

At 10:30 I watch a pre-premiere report on Peter done for Austrian TV (ÖRF2). Peter’s crime, the reporter and his commentators agree, is that he is a “Serbenfreund,” a friend of the Serbs. Not good to be a friend of the enemy. Peter should have known better. It’s an old story: Jap lover, Kraut lover, Jew lover, Nigger lover, Serb lover.

I turn off the sentential piss and turn back to Peter’s play. Before midnight I’m out of paper. I write across the face of my travel itinerary. I fill margins. By one a.m., having exhausted all possibilities, I look through the cupboards and drawers in my room. The drawer of the night table opens to a Gideon Bible, in the back of which are ten blank pages. I decide the hand of God has provided and rip them out and continue translating till first light.

9 June 1999, before midnight, Žarko’s birthday

I ought to go to bed, but I'm still reeling from the events of the day. Several hours ago NATO and the Yugoslav Parliament came to some kind of agreement ending the bombing after 78 days.

And, I'm just back from the world premiere of Peter's "The Play of the Film of the War," directed by Claus Peymann. I’ve never attended the world premiere of a play of this magnitude; and I’ve seldom been this moved, this challenged, by a work of art.

Peter has filmmakers John Ford and Luis Buñuel in a Serbian town ten years after the war trying to decide how to make a film of the war. Characters who appear before the directors tell conflicting and complex stories as the play feels its way to questions about war and its aftermath. The really bad guys of the play, three "Internationals" who know all the answers, who dictate all the terms, who can think only in absolutes, appear on the stage as follows: "Three mountainbike riders, preceded by the sound of squealing brakes, burst through the swinging door, covered with mud clear up to their helmets. They race through the hall, between tables and chairs, perilously close to the people sitting there. 'Where are we?' the First International asks. 'Don't know,' the second answers. 'Not a clue,' the third says." 

American and European moralists, functionaries with no hint of self-irony or humor, absolutists who run the world because of their economic power – these sorry excuses for human beings were depicted this evening as mountainbike riders.

            Žarko, I said, Don’t you ever tell Peter I ride a mountain bike.

            No, he whispered, I’d never do that.

            The play drew on several incidents from our trip, including when Peter put his coat around the shoulders of the OSCE woman in Višegrad. After the performance, flushed with enthusiasm and insight, I told Peter how well he had integrated that real event into an imaginative play.

            “Dr. Scott,” he chided. “Always the professor.”


............. for a very interesting set of thoughts about the play, by early Handke translator Michael Roloff (Kaspar, The Goalie's Anxiety, etc.), click HERE

Wildflowers #18 + Colorful visitors

lazuli bunting eating grass seeds

lupine / Lupinus argenteus

blue butterfly on yellow sweet clover

goat's beard and red poppy

Sibley's "Guide to Birds" lists the hooded oriole's range in Mexico, southern Arizona and southern California with a couple of visits up the Pacific coast. Absolutely nothing in Utah. Our visitor this morning puts the lie to that!

hooded oriole / Icterus cucullatus

sunset over utah valley

sunset over utah valley

Günter Grass’ Bombshell Poem “What Must be Said”

i got this print in germany while working on grass' novel The Flounder

Two months ago today the Nobel-Prize winner published a poem in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that elicited some thoughtful remarks:

Günter Grass is a NAZI. Günter Grass is an anti-Semite. Günter Grass is odious. Günter Grass has committed a mortal literary sin. Günter Grass has propagated blood libel. Günter Grass is persona non grata in Israel. 

Not since Heinrich Heine's "The Silesian Weavers" earned jail time for anyone caught with the poem on their person ("A curse on God, King, and Fatherland!") has a poem drawn such attention.

The poem has three basic threads of thought. The first is about why the poem’s persona has remained silent about a country he hesitates to name because of his own country’s guilt vis-à-vis that other country. The second is about the threat of nuclear weapons in the Mideast, about Israel’s nuclear capabilities and Iran’s potential nuclear capability, and about a threatened strike by Israel against Iran. The third is about the morality of supplying a German-built submarine to Israel.

First thread:

Why, however, was I silent until now?

Because I thought my ancestry,

afflicted by a never-to-be-overcome stain,

requires that this fact never be spoken as truth

about the land of Israel to which I am bound

and want to remain bound.

Second thread:

It is the asserted right to a first strike

that could eliminate the Iranian people

enslaved and made into organized celebrants

by a mouthy hero because in his realm an

atom bomb is supposed to be in construction.   

Third thread:

. . . my country . . .

is to deliver an additional submarine

to Israel, whose specialty

is to have the capability of directing annihilating warheads

to where the existence of a single atomic bomb is unproven,

though fear wants to provide the proof . . .

Why does the persona break the inhibitions of thread one to assert what he sees as the facts of thread two in order to hinder the business transaction of thread three?

Only thus can all find succor, the Israelis and Palestinians,

and beyond that, all people who live densely packed together 

as enemies in these 

regions occupied by insanity

and finally we too.

What will be the punishment for doing so?

. . . the verdict “anti-Semitism” is understood.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung! This eight-syllable word with its hanging and rising consonants (four g’s! htblt!), this single word that might translate as an overcoming of or a coming to terms with the past, raises a powerful question: how might the German language be remade as a tool of reason and peace and humanity after having been a blunt perpetrator of Nazi ideology? The answers are legion and their names are Günter Eich, Ilse Aichinger, Heinrich Böll (Nobel Prize), Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass (Nobel Prize), Peter Handke, and so on. 

Grass once argued that “Adorno’s claim that after Auschwitz no more poems could be written has provoked so many misunderstandings that the following interpretation ought to be appended, at least tentatively: poems that have been written after Auschwitz will have to submit to being measured by Auschwitz.”

Measuring his own silence and then his own desire to speak by that standard, Grass’ persona says what he thinks must be said. He says it carefully, almost torturously, bending and twisting his sentences and lines to say it with strong nuance.

He says it in the context of six decades of literary work that includes The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, Local Anesthetic, The Flounder, and other works that investigate ideologies and mythologies and lies perpetrated by the German language (and by extension by all languages and even by himself: "I am skeptical even of my own skepticism"). My analysis of some of these can be found HERE and HERE.

And now, because he has dared to utter the word "Israel," he is suddenly and certainly a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a persona non grata.

The furor is telling, indicative of a coercive herd mentality, of "accepted ideas" a la Flaubert, of a level of intelligent public discourse that has gone extinct.

In 1996 Peter Handke ran into a similar buzz saw when he published, also in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, his long essay A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (the English version, in my translation, Viking, 1997). Like Grass, Handke was concerned about the use of language, of rhetoric, of silence. Like Grass, Handke was branded an unregenerate and dangerous enemy of democracy. While Grass’s sin is anti-Semitism, Handke’s was being a Serbenfreund, a friend of the Serbs. Like Grass, Handke was accused of saying what any reader of his text knew that he hadn’t said. In The New Republic, for instance, the German writer Peter Schneider, like many others elsewhere, accused Handke of denying the massacre at Srebrenica. Because he couldn’t or wouldn’t read, Schneider ignored explicit passages of the text: “’What, are you trying to help minimize the Serbian crimes in Bosnia, in the Krajina, in Slavonia, by means of a media critique that sidesteps the basic facts? . . . You aren’t going to question the massacre at Srebrenica too, are you?’ ‘No,’ I said.”

How does one argue the merits of a text, of an argument in words, with zealots who don’t care what the text says? How does one argue with zealots who demand that there be no argument? How does one break silence when silence is demanded?

For my fairly literal translation of the poem as well as Michael Roloff’s comprehensive (and amazing) collection of links to responses to the poem (and to a second poem Grass published about Germany's relationship to the Greek financial meltdown), see the hundreds of comments to this earlier post. 


Michael Roloff has a most thoughtful summary discussion of the controversy HERE (scroll down just a bit to find the colorful essay).

Wildflowers #17 + Wildfires + Summer Scenes

Some new flowers yesterday and some views from our deck and finally an attempt to reproduce the sounds and scents (no luck with the latter) I hear and smell through my study window.


[My brother John would have been 61 today. 21 years without him. Wish we could sit together on the deck this morning and have a late breakfast and listen to the bees and smell the flowers and share stories and contemplate the future.]

coreopsis, Coreopsis grandiflora or lanceolata?

sego lily, Calochortus nuttallii

showy milkweed, Asclepias speciosa

Mexican evening primrose, Oenothera speciosa

Richard Skelton, Landings

AUTUMN



A century's passing and the listening


rattle. Crows bicker in the trees


overhead. Rhymed leaves. Dew Grass.


Wing skirr. Engine. Siren. Machinic


murmur. Threads across the river.


Collective memory. Left to nettles


and to barbed wire.

When the flowerville blogger sent me this poem by Richard Skelton, knowing I am thinking about how barbed wire has been construed in literature, I went looking for the book Landings.

I found it in/on/at a spare and beautiful blog. When I decided to order the book and the accompanying music, the link took me to another striking site. My order elicited a personal email:


Dear Scott

Just a quick note to say your Landings is in the post. Here's the tracking number: RJ962567042GB, which you can track at www.royalmail.com.

With many thanks and warmest wishes

Rich

The book arrived, royal mail indeed, with handwritten address.

Inside, the book was carefully wrapped in tissue. I washed my hands before I opened it.

 There was a note enclosed. The book was signed.

Landings breathes silence with its generously white pages, marked by type only where necessary.

The landscape, including the ruins of human habitation, of the West Pennine Moors is a subject of the book and of the music recorded on the moors. A related subject is loss. Another is language, names.

The book's notes are as interesting as the poems and quotations and thoughts that make up the main text.

For instance:

25 {many of these places have names} The question of names, name-giving and remembrance is, for me, a recurring one. Names become physical. . . . Place-names are embodied, and are subject to the same bodily process of change and decay. The question then becomes one of tenure, of endurance. How long can they last? . . . Maps are vital repositories of our knowledge of place. They enshrine the collective memory— recording not only what is current, but what is deemed worth holding onto from the past. But in so doing, they enforce a mononymous relationship between name and place—rarely does any location receive more than a single epithet. Yet this fact belies the complex relationship we have with our surroundings, and the many different ways in which we express our sense of place. Shouldn't there be room on maps for local names, folk-names and familial names; for narrative, personality and myth? What happened to the polyonymy of place?

Among the names Skelton reclaims from the place fallen into disuse is our family name: Abbott.


In 1696 a John Abbott of Anglezarke was church-warden at Rivington.


John Abbott is my brother. Was my brother. His birthday is four days from now. He died in 1991 at the age of 40.


In a very ruinous state. 


Ravaged by AIDS.


John Herbert Abbott. Also known as Jay.


Below the name of the book on the title page, Richard Skelton prints the name of his lost wife: Louise Skelton.


Landings worked a profound quiet into my being. A melancholy and meaningful stillness for which I am grateful.

"The barbed wire stretched across the landscape was like the strings on an instrument."

The Worm

My Grandson Jaron turned 9 a couple of days ago.


He's a talented boy: