VOYAGE BY DUGOUT

It has been a long trip, but the end is in sight. As you can see by the condition of the book in the photo, it and I have done a lot of work together.


Here's a snippet from the beginning of the trip:

1:30 a.m., 1 June 1998

            I’m sitting in my room in the Hotel Višegrad, looking out onto the Drina and the Turkish bridge, still lit by floodlamps. The bridge’s eleven arches are reflected in the silky black river. A nightingale calls from across the river. I’ve never heard a nightingale; but it can be nothing else. Unmistakable. It calls again, and then again. It’s indescribably romantic. I’m alone in my room.

            From the terrace below there is an occasional burst of laughter from Peter, Zlatko, Thomas, and Žarko, who are still talking with the two women from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the younger one from Spain, the older from France. We argued for hours about the role of organizations like theirs in Yugoslavia.

            How long have you been in Yugoslavia? Peter asked the French woman.

For a year-and-a-half, she answered.

Do you speak Serbo-Croatian? Peter asked.

No, she answered. I’ve been too busy to learn. The first town I was in was under attack for nine months. I worked through an interpreter.

You are here to tell the people how to run their country and you don’t understand their language! Peter exclaimed. You can’t bother to learn their language?

Who are you? the woman asked. What are you doing here? What gives you the moral right to judge what I’m doing?

Go home, Peter said.

Fuck you, the woman said.

Go home.

Fuck you.

The night air had chilled, and the French woman was shivering. Peter took his coat from the back of his chair and draped it around her shoulders. There, he said, that will help.

Fuck you, she said, and pulled the coat around herself.

A year later the trip continued:

6 June 1999, Vienna

           In the city center, I stumble onto a Sunday-evening demonstration against NATO and for Yugoslavia. “NATO – fascistik, NATO – fascistik!” the crowd of maybe 2000 chants.

Back in my room, unable to sleep, I turn back to my translation of Peter’s new play. I wish Žarko were here to compare notes. How did he translate “Fertigsatzpisse”? Pissing your finished, your modular sentences? Sentential piss?

At 10:30 I watch a 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 return 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, Vienna

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 seldom been this moved, this challenged, by a work of art.

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.” 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 mountainbike.”

           “No, my friend,” 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 Visegrad. After the play, flushed with enthusiasm and insight, I told Peter how well he had integrated a real event into an imaginative play. “Brilliant to put her and her friends on mountainbikes!”

          “Doktor Scott,” he chided, “Doktor Scott. Always on duty.” 

And now, thirteen years later, after trying 20 or 25 potential publishers, one of which backed out at the last minute out of fear of what Susan Sontag might think, I've just sent off the translation to PAJ, the Performing Arts Journal published by MIT Press. It will appear in May. Makes me happy, even as I and the book have seen better days.

Thoughts about Translation

I've just read The Devil's Star and Nemesis, a couple of mystery novels by Jo Nesbo, a Norwegian writer who reminds me some of Sam Shepard. They even share musical careers early in their lives.

The books are rich with good characters and complex in their plots. There are satisfying oddities like the initial scene of Nemesis that makes a reader consider and reconsider the odd but ultimately understandable shifts in level. I'll read more of Nesbo's work in the future.

Nesbo's books have been translated into 40 languages, including the English translation I read. It's British English, which gives the books a slightly foreign flavor. Coupled with all the Norwegian words (Arne, Oleg, Lev, Vigdis, Larkollen, Valkyrie plass, etc.), the unfamiliar English words like boiler suit (for coverall) remind me that I'm immersed in the mind of someone quite different from me. Brecht worked hard in his plays to produce the effect of alienation in the audience -- in the service of thought, of reflection. I like the way Nesbo's books, in translation, do the same.

So far so good.

But then there are sentences like this one: "A publishing consultant had finally cracked on the telephone and hissed that he could no longer put up with her 'hysterical fussing.'" Cracked on the telephone?

Or like this one: "His brain might have told him it was too late, but his hands fumbled in a mixture of shock and stupidity. . . ." Fumbled in a mixture of shock and stupidity?

Since I don't read Norwegian, and since there are lots of slang phrases in British English I don't know, I can't be sure; but my assumption is that the translator himself has produced these and a good many other awkward formulations.

That's exactly what I most fear as a translator, that I'll mangle the good prose of the author, mangle it by remaining too close to the original or mangle it by drifting too far away from the original, that I'll screw it up by not understanding or because my English isn't supple enough. The fears compound when the author is Peter Handke and the text is itself about language.

Translating Peter's play Voyage by Dugout, I broke into a colder sweat with each new page, with each new draft (and there were dozens of drafts). The translated play still has no publisher (although it's being reviewed right now by PAJ Publications), so I'm not yet accountable. But the time will come, and when it does, I'll hold my breath until a reader comes up with phrases like the ones I found in Nemesis and I'll blush and curse myself.

A brief excerpt from my translation:

GREEK

For more than a decade you have pissed on the same trees with your sentential piss. The beautiful Dinarian forests stink to high heaven of your piss.

THIRD

First: while practicing their profession here in the war three hundred and twelve of my colleagues lost their lives or were wounded or were thrown out of the country . Second: in North Africa three to seven of my colleagues die every week for the sake of truth. Third: at this moment, across the globe, about four thousand of my colleagues are behind prison walls because of their convictions. Fourth: one of my colleagues, risking his life, saved thirteen orphans from the besieged city –

ANNOUNCER

That was a film –

THIRD

weeps.

FIRST INTERNATIONAL

Let him speak. Wasn’t that the plan? – I have always depicted the atrocities on all sides. Listen to my New York Review chronicle of the events in the village of Kravica, where some of the people here were victims. He reads: “The other side” – you know which I mean – “in the neighboring village” – you know which I mean – “had become the stronger over time. Their commander, bodybuilder, former bar bouncer” – mine is a thoroughly critical perspective – “had put together a force so ruthless that it struck the fear of God into the peasants of Kravica.” Ha! “But the greatest weapon, and the commander relied on this, were the thousands of refugees displaced as the war began. Behind the first wave of attacking soldiers, the refugees fell upon enemy villages when the defenses broke down, and, get them! at them! kill them!, with knives, hoes, hatchets, most with their bare hands – impossible for the commander to control. The climax of the commander’s successes came on the day when the people from here celebrated their special Christmas, two weeks later than is our custom. The women of Kravica had worked for days preparing suckling pigs, fresh bread, pickled tomatoes and peppers. And then Christmas Eve! After dark, three thousand men of the commander’s regular army assembled on the hills around Kravica. Behind them, the bold band. An indescribable noise at dawn when they started banging pots and pans. Increasingly he recites from memory: ‘Today you’ll get the Christmas you deserve! God is great!’, bellowed the men, screamed the women. And off they went! The forces led by the commander – who, by the way, speaks fluent English and German, the latter with a slight Bavarian accent – wearing white uniforms that glowed in the sunrise! Melting with the snow! From all sides they descended on the dumbfounded villagers and their Christmas pigs! And behind them the cacophony of the starving refugees! Revenge! God is great! The village defenders, already the minorité, were vastly outnumbered, quickly overwhelmed! Only dead and wounded in the village ruiné of Kravica and the attackers: fired into the bodies, plunged in their couteaux, smashed heads; the commandant no longer in complete control of the people he relied on. And they, stupéfiés, their thousand mouths hanging open at the sight of the Noël feast, stood there as if paralyzed by the sight of the pâtisseries, the slivovitz bottles and the roast Schweinchen on the enemy stoves: God is great! They laughed and shouted and plunged into the pâtisseries, fell on the salads, smashed the Schnaps bottles, while the ashes of burning houses sifted like snow onto the hillside and the runaway pigs sniffed at the mounds of corpses. The name of the village alone, by the way, speaks volumes: Pig-, pardon me, cow-village. And that was the commander’s great triumph. He left his command-center just before it was captured by the enemy, which then committed the well-known massacre. He is now a pub owner in the capitol city of the martyrs. – Mark Winner, Pulitzer Prize.

GREEK

Is there such a thing? Misbegotten language for a good cause? The end of aesthetics? The end of a sense for truth and beauty. The end of a care for form.

THE THREE

laughing. Of a care for form?

GREEK

Of a care for form. A care for form. The world has never had a chance against you sonorous babblers. You throw your weight around because you recognize the authority of no court. You are the final judges and at the same time the criminals. That no one can depend on you – okay, that’s your ideal, taken from one of your ancestors – but that nothing can be expected from you, nothing at all, absolutely nothing: Shame on you! We are saturated with hate, increasing hatred of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Because our hatred of the familiar has no outlet, it turns against the unfamiliar. And more and more is made unfamiliar and unrecognizable by daily proclamations and by a surfeit of information. And thus hatred of the unfamiliar gnaws at our bowels.

FIRST

as if understanding. You won’t change that. That’s the way it is. That’s the state of affairs. That’s the world. That’s the marketplace. That’s the price.

SECOND and THIRD

singing. That’s the price. We are the market place. We are the world. We are in power. We write the history.