Ali and Nino (#europe, #WITMonth)

"...and Nino Kipriani was still the most beautiful girl in the world."

Ali and Nino are in their late teens and finishing their schooling in Baku just before World War I. Baku (now in Azerbaijan) was then part of the Russian Empire. Ali attends an elite Russian-run school for non-Russians; he's good at languages, bad at most other subjects, but good enough at math that he can help Nino with her homework.

"Ali Khan, a train goes from the town X to the town Y, doing 50 miles an hour..."

Ali is a Shiite Muslim, and Nino is Georgian Orthodox and they're in love.

His relatives are all in Persia; hers in Georgia, but family differences are the least of the impediments to their love. His father is happy with the marriage; hers only insists that she finish school first. 

Ali doesn't drink--until he goes off to Tiflis to meet Nino's cousins. Oh, my head! Accommodating their own  different world views is the greater challenge.

The first half of the novel is light and charming and funny. It doesn't get to stay that way: world events intervene. A servant reports the news:

"Nothing special, little master. The neighbour's women have quarrelled, a donkey bolted, it ran into the well, and there it still is. The czar has deigned to declare war on several European monarchs."

It may have all seemed very far off at first, but Baku saw the armies of Tsarist Russia, the Sunni Ottoman Empire, the English, the soldiers of the briefly independent Azerbaijan, and finally the return of Russian soldiers, now Soviet.

Highly recommended.

The novel crisscrosses the Caucasus with scenes set in Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran, but is mainly in Baku: "This wonderful town, the gate of Europe." 

I learned about the novel from Major Yammerton's blog who also read it for this year's European Reading Challenge. His thoughts are here.

The novel first came out in German, in Austria, in 1937. A difficult time and it didn't have much opportunity to make an impact at first. Kurban Said is a pseudonym, and now nobody is quite sure who he or she was. Likely enough, it was more than one person working together. The candidates: Yusif Vazir Chamanziminli was an Azerbaijani statesman and author killed by Stalin's minions in 1943. Lev Nussimbaum was born a Jew in Kiev, but lived much of his younger years in Baku and converted to Islam, writing sometimes as Essad Bey. And then there's Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, in whose name the copyright was registered. Nussimbaum and Ehrenfels were known to be friends. There are other, less probable candidates as well.

And if one of the people hiding behind the pseudonym Kurban Said is Ehrenfels, this also counts for:

The novel was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 1970.

The Alexiad of Anna Comnena

"The date was the first of December in the seventh indiction. [1083] He [Alexius I Comnenus] found the empress in the throes of childbirth, in the room set apart long ago for an empress's confinement. Our ancestors called it the porphyra--hence the world-famous name porphyrogenitus. At dawn (it was a Saturday) a baby girl was born to them, who resembled her father, so they said, in all respects. I was that baby."

Born in a room lined with purple marble, that baby was Anna Comnena, who went on to write a history of her father Alexius' reign as Emperor of Byzantium from 1081-1118. 

The Comneni were a prominent Byzantine family and Alexius' uncle had been emperor from 1057-1059. But to become emperor in 1081 he had to lead a coup. The previous emperor Nicephorus Boutaniates was elderly and had no clear successor. As Anna tells it, Alexius and his brother Isaac became worried at the machinations in the palace, and decided to simply leave Byzantium. Whether that was exactly so or not, they ultimately decided the safest thing for them was simply to seize power.

Alexius and Isaac were both senior figures in the Byzantine military, with Alexius, the younger of the two brothers, holding the more senior office, Great Domestic of the West, which meant he was the supreme commander of military forces in the European half of the Byzantine empire. After some discussion between them it was Alexius who became emperor, though his brother remained a top official. Alexius as a general had been successful in staving off the various threats, but still the state of the empire in 1081 was bad. The Byzantines had lost the disastrous battle of Manzikert in what is now eastern Turkey in 1071, and the lands they had firm control of were little more than the city itself by the time Alexius proclaims himself emperor:

"Alexius knew that the Empire was almost at its last gasp. The east was being horribly ravaged by the Turks; the west was in a bad condition, while Robert [Guiscard] strained every nerve to put on the throne the pseudo-Michael who had taken refuge with him...The Romans [for Anna, what's our Byzantine Empire is still the Roman Empire] had no worthwhile forces; in fact there were no more than 300 soldiers in the capital...In the imperial treasury there were no reserves of money with which he could summon allies..."

The first ten years are pretty much constant warfare. He has to beat back the Seljuk Turks, the Normans under Robert Guiscard, and both Cuman and Pecheneg nomads from north of the Danube. A Seljuk Turk attempts to create a new state centred on Smyrna and leads sea raids up the Turkish coast, taking over Lesbos and Chios. All of that has to be stopped.

As Anna tells it, Alexius has a number of quite competent military assistants and advisers, starting with George Palaeologus. He doesn't often listen to them, though, and hot-headedly charges into battle, leading from the front, and getting beaten, even after Palaeologus suggested maybe that wasn't wise. In particular he loses three times to the Normans before he finally manages to fight them to a standstill. In the end it's mostly the death of Robert Guiscard which slows that source of attack.

It gets easier after ten years, but still not easy. There are a number of internal rebellions and the Pechenegs haven't yet given up, but the empire's boundaries are a bit more stable. Then the First Crusade comes through town. This is both opportunity and threat. The avowed enemy of the crusaders are the Muslims, and in particular the Seljuk Turks, who were also a traditional enemy of Byzantium. But how committed are the crusaders actually to their stated mission? And anyway do the Western Christians actually think the Eastern Christians are legitimately Christian? It's in these years that Alexius' reputation for wiliness gets established--Anna admires wiliness, even in enemies such as Bohemond, Robert Guiscard's son--and Alexius mostly gets the Crusaders to move on towards Jerusalem, and some of their conquests end up in his hands.

Then in 1118, he dies. How old he was is not perfectly clear with a range of dates for his birthday from 1048 to 1057. He's succeeded by his son John.

It's actually a pretty lively read, especially the early battle scenes. Anna says her father didn't like to talk about his military exploits in public, but if it was just the family, he could be persuaded to yarn away at dinner. Palace politics were a little harder to follow, especially as there were far too many people named Nicephorus--her husband, her husband's grandfather, who'd also been an emperor, the previous emperor, at least two rebel leaders. Nicephorus is the Greek for bringer of victory, so it's a well-omened name, but still, what's wrong with a nice George or John? (Not that there aren't a couple of those...)

Anna writes this at the end of her life, after she's been sent to a convent: she led a rebellion against her brother after her father died and that was her punishment. She says she has some old veterans she can talk to and ask questions of; she's got some treaties that she reproduces. She frequently quotes both the Bible and Homer; her Bible quotes tend to be a little fuzzy; her Homer is pretty accurate. Make of that what you will. 

Edward Gibbon, he of The Decline and Fall, complains she's too biased a source to be trusted, but the translator E. R. A. Sewter writes in the introduction that he thinks she's pretty accurate, and that was the standard scholarly opinion of the time (1969).  She clearly likes her father, and acknowledges the possibility of bias:

"I regard him as dear, but truth is dearer still."

In any case Alexius did begin a century of rule by Comneni, which was a late good moment in the history of the empire. 

I've been meaning to read this since I read Sir Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris. Scott says he uses Anna Comnena as a source, and she's a character in the novel as well; in the novel she's as a bit of a bore who insists on droning on at her literary teas. That felt a bit unfair, even as I was reading Scott, and now I've read the history, it seems quite unfair. She's engaging. One of the conspirators against Alexius is Anna's husband (a Nicephorus, of course), but that's unfair, too; he was loyal to Alexius and died of a fever while on campaign. The husband is also presented a bit of an anti-intellectual bonehead. Not true: he wrote a history of the period just before Anna's book, and Sewter says it's useful, though not as good as Anna's.

Some of Scott does clearly come from Anna, though. There is a crusader knight who hops on the throne in Byzantium and is just a general jerk, but his name is Latinus, according to Anna, and not Count Robert. Still that was the clear source for some of Count Robert's behaviour. Scott says he modelled Robert's wife Brenhilda on Gaita, Robert Guiscard's wife:

"Robert's wife Gaita, who used to accompany him on campaign, like another Pallas, if not a second Athena, seeing the runaways and glaring fiercely at them, shouted in a very loud voice: 'How far will ye run? Halt! Be men!'"

Hmm, maybe. I still say Brenhilda has more to do with some female warrior from Ariosto than any more realistic source.

Anyway, an enjoyable and interesting read. But one I meant to finish a week earlier because then it would have been a Big Book of Summer, one from my 20 Books of Summer list, and a good entry for Women in Translation month. Oh, well... 😉 Still it does count for the European Reading Challenge. It chronicles fighting in what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, but Constantinople and many of the battles make it my trip to Turkey for the year.

Jahan Malek Khatun (#WITMonth)

 

Come Here A Moment

Come here a moment, sit with me, don't sleep tonight,

Consider well my heart's unhappy plight, tonight;

And let your face's presence lighten me, and give

The loveliness of moonlight to the night, tonight.

Be kind now to this stranger, and don't imitate

Life as it leaves me in its headlong flight, tonight.

Be sweet to me now as your eyes are sweet, don't twist

Away now like your curls, to left and right, tonight.

Don't sweep me from you like the dust before your door;

Dowse all the flames of longing you ignite, tonight.

Why do you treat me with such cruelty now, my friend,

So that my tears obliterate my sight, tonight?

If, for a moment, I could see you in my dreams,

I'd know the sum of all the world's delight, tonight.

-Jahan Malek Khatun (tr. Dick Davis)

I read that volume Faces of Love, with translations of three Shirazi poets earlier in the summer and quite liked it. I quoted some by Jahan Malek Khatun (1324-1393, approximately) earlier, but saved this one for Women in Translation month.

Two by Amélie Nothomb (#WITMonth)

It's Women in Translation month! I had one unread Amélie Nothomb novel on the shelf, and I got another one from the library.

Thirst

I read the library book first. Thirst is her most recent novel in English; it came out earlier this year. The French dates from 2019, but it isn't her most recent novel in French. (Well, she keeps busy.) 

Christ tells his own story, from his condemnation by Pontius Pilate until after his resurrection. He's wry and jokey about it until the pain doesn't allow that any more:

"The jailer said to me:

'Try to get some sleep. You need to be in good shape tomorrow.'

On seeing my ironic expression, he added:

'Don't laugh. It takes good health to die. Don't say I didn't warn you.'" [17]

"As to calling her Mary, [Mary Magdalene] that's out of the question. It's never a good idea to confuse your sweetheart with your mother." [27]

He discusses, wonders almost, about the nature of religious inspiration, of mysticism:

"It's no coincidence that I chose this part of the world...I needed a land of great thirst. No other sensation more eloquently evokes what I seek to inspire than thirst. That is surely why no one has experienced it as I have.

Truth to tell: what you feel when  you are dying of thirst is something you must cultivate. Therein lies the mystical urge. It is not its metaphor. When you are no longer hungry, that is called satiety. When you are no longer tired, that is called rest. When you cease to suffer, that is called comfort. When you are no longer thirsty, there is no word for it.

...

There are people who do not consider themselves mystics. They are wrong. It takes only a moment of extreme thirst to attain such a state. And the ineffable state when the parched man raises a glass of water to his lips: that is God." [34-5]

I thought Nothomb's handling of the psychology of Christ's moment of doubt was well done. (The "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" moment.) On the whole I thought it was a sympathetic portrait of Christ, and one that, while not orthodox, wouldn't necessarily offend a believer. (Though there are those believers who are easily offended.) The least orthodox moment was after the resurrection. Christ appears, but it's a distinctly non-bodily resurrection.

"To experience thirst, you must be alive. I lived so intensely that I died thirsting.

Perhaps that is what is meant by eternal life." [90]

It's a thoughtful and interesting volume and not what I expected. (Which is generally a good thing.)

But. There was some classical Greek in the book which was wrong. Christ distinguishes between why and how in Greek and then misspells how. I'm not sure what to make of that. (I looked and saw it was also wrong in the French.) Additionally Christ says, "Christ means gentle."[40] Maybe the actual Christ is gentle, though he claims not in the context. (Rather, it's mother who is gentle.) But the word doesn't mean that. It means the anointed one. 

On the other hand, while his Greek may be poor, he can quote Latin. (A language the historical Christ was less likely to know.) "Homo sum. Humani a me nihil alienum puto." "I am a man. I think nothing human is alien to me," is from Terence's Heautontimorumenos, and Christ paraphrases it twice. 

Tokyo Fiancée

My first experience of any sort with Amélie Nothomb was the movie version of Tokyo Fiancée. Before that she was just a name to me, but when the movie showed up for the film festival here in Toronto in 2014, I thought, oh, I'm curious about her, let's see that one. I usually try to read the novel before seeing the movie, but I didn't and just read it now. The novel came out in French in 2007, in English in 2009.

'Amélie,' the character, lived in Japan until she was five years old. Now twenty or so, she decides to go back to Japan to get in touch with her roots, learn the language. She's going to teach French to pay her way. 

Her first pupil is Rinri, the son of a well-to-do family of jewellers. She and Rinri get along from the start. He may be more interested in her than she him, but she definitely likes him. But his parents are suspicious of this footloose foreign woman (and his grandparents even more suspicious) and she has a roommate. Where to meet? "In love, as in anything, infrastructure is everything." [49] Eventually her roommate goes off for a trip; then his parents leave for a while. Rinri is capable of good cooking. (Though not always--when he tries Western dishes he fails.) They go on the sort of jaunts that young Japanese couples go on. Eventually Rinri, who has easy access to good jewelry, proposes with a ring and 'Amélie' accepts. Was this the right thing for her to do? 

Our 'Amélie' is also interested in writing. Is marriage compatible with a career as a writer? The novel is set in the late 80s, and 'Amélie' writes a novel with the same title as the first novel of the actual Amélie Nothomb.

The movie pushes events forward by twenty years, and while the first two-thirds of the movie corresponds pretty well to the novel, the endings are quite different. But both are pretty engaging.

I've now read four of Amélie Nothomb's novels, which might sound impressive except that they are all pretty short and they represent a mere 14% of her novels. Nevertheless...I'm going to make a sweeping generalization. 😉 She starts off with jokes--good jokes, they are pretty funny--but then she swerves into something more serious and the novels engage--in an interesting way--with more serious issues. (Mysticism, career, war, friendship.) Of the ones I've read, I thought Tokyo Fiancée was the best, but I will read more.

Both of these were ably translated by Alison Anderson.

"As always in my life I was the only Belgian." [25]

Most of Tokyo Fiancée takes place in Japan, but a bit of it takes place in Belgium, making it my entry for Belgium for the European Reading Challenge...

Amélie Nothomb's Life Form (#WITMonth)

In Life Form, the character Amélie Nothomb (sort of to be confused with the author, but not completely) receives a letter from Iraq, from Melvin Mapple, who writes, "I'm a private in the US Army...I've been posted in Baghdad ever since the beginning of this fucking war, over six years ago."

She decides to write back. 

The correspondence is basically the book. It turns out the Melvin Mapple has become terribly obese--this was a problem among American soldiers in Iraq, though Mapple is an extreme case--and is unhappy with the whole situation. Though both are now against the war, Amélie tries to help him make sense out of the situation.

I thought the letters from Mapple were brilliantly convincing. They sounded like I would imagine a fairly literate, but not especially educated, young American writing. So all kudos to Nothomb, but then also to the translator, Alison Anderson. 

This is the second novel I've read by Nothomb and I've seen the movie version of a third. She's a Belgian writer now living in France, so generally is the Amélie Nothomb character in the books. Nevertheless they are clearly fiction. Pétronille, that I read earlier, was funnier, but the Iraq War and obesity are not exactly funny subjects.

Still Melvin's obesity gets transformed into an artistic statement against the war, which is a little funny, and allows for witty double-edged observations on the nature of art. 

"...my obesity has become my life's work.' [49]

"I had not known how to provide him with one essential artistic quality: doubt." [64]

"There is a crook in every writer." [108]

The novel ends in a surprising twist.

I don't think either Life Form or Pétronille are considered among the very top Amélie Nothomb novels, yet I found both of them funny and thoughtful. They're also short and easy-to-read. But if she gets better than these, she could be very good indeed. Hygiene and the Assassin, The Prince's Act, and especially Fear and Trembling have all won major French language prizes.

Not sure about that picture of her on the cover, though.

Anna Seghers' Transit (#WITMonth)

 "Aren't you fed up with such thrilling stories?"

The narrator of Anna Seghers' Transit buttonholes the reader and asks that question--with exasperation. With cause. He's a German, persona non grata with the Nazis, stuck in Marseille, in Vichy France. He's neither able to stay, nor to leave, nor to return home. A life less thrilling would be welcome.

Nevertheless, Transit is a story with thrills.

At the start of the novel, the narrator Seidler is in a work camp for enemy aliens in the north of France. He'd already escaped from a Nazi prison into France; as the Nazis roll into France in 1940, the prisoners have to convince the French guard to look the other way as they flee the camp, Seidler escaping for a second time, because most of them would be doomed if caught by the Nazis. 

Seidler makes his way south with other refugees, passing through Paris. He agrees as a favor for a friend to deliver a letter to the writer Weidel, but when he finds Weidel's place of residence, Weidel has committed suicide, leaving only a manuscript and his documents. The letter he was meant to deliver, now undeliverable, tells him that the writer's estranged widow needs the documents, as well as Weidel himself, to get a visa so she can leave France. Seidler takes the manuscript, the documents, the suitcase, and goes south to Marseille to deliver all these things to the waiting widow.

So far the story could easily be by Helen MacInnes or Alan Furst. But Seidler is not a naif caught up in a romance, nor a dedicated anti-Nazi; he's just a mechanic who doesn't like the Nazis (and whom the Nazis do not like.) He'd like to settle in Marseille, stop running. He becomes attached to the child of friends, a child who lives in fear of abandonment. The local authorities tell him he can only stay in Marseille so long as he can demonstrate that he's making efforts to leave. So in addition to MacInnes and Furst, you can throw in a bit of Kafka. Everyone in Marseille is facing the same conundrum: you have to have an exit visa, a transit visa for any country you pass through on your way out, as well as an entry visa for your destination country. Any one of those visas can expire while you're still trying to acquire the others.

He helps people who really do want to leave, who have to leave, but for himself he dates, falls in love, discovers pizza. He just wants a normal-ish life, but he's been thrust into a thriller story, albeit one with Kafka-esque twists.

Anna Seghers herself was German and was arrested in 1933 by the Nazis for being a communist. She was released, but she was also of Jewish ancestry and left for France soon after. She passed through Marseille on her way to Mexico where she spent the war years before returning to East Germany after the war. Transit first appeared in English and Spanish translations in 1944, and not in German until 1948, and then only in East Germany. My edition has an afterward by Heinrich Böll for its first publication in West Germany.

I thought it was very good. One of the interesting things about it were the characters who did not want to go. Sure, Rick Blaine decides to stay, but he never seemed like he would be in danger. I mean, he's Humphrey Bogart after all. In Transit, Seidler is not the only one who doesn't want to cross the ocean. Another returns to Lithuania, his home, even though it's almost certainly a death sentence. Others decide to quit running, knowing or suspecting the cost.

It's Women in Translation month! This was translated by Margot Dembauer Betto for New York Review of Books.

Hannah Arendt's Men In Dark Times

Men in Dark Times is a collection of Hannah Arendt's occasional articles that came out in 1968. The pieces were from the previous fifteen years and cover figures such Karl Jaspers, Pope John XXIII, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, Bertolt Brecht. Despite the title two women are included: Rosa Luxembourg and Isak Dinesen.

Arendt is probably best known for her great book Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial report on the trial in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann for his part in the Holocaust. It's the source of the phrase, 'the banality of evil.' She was also a political philosopher and a scholar of totalitarianism.

I pulled this off the shelf to read her essay on Hermann Broch because I was still thinking about The Death of Virgil, but that was actually the least interesting essay in the book: it's the introduction a volume out of the collected essays of Broch, and it was simply too specialized for me.

Some of the other essays are slender: she has some interesting ideas about Dinesen, for instance, but the context was a biography of Dinesen she was reviewing that she didn't think was very good, and that distracted her from the more interesting parts, I thought. Half the essays are translated from German.

But the essays on Benjamin, and particularly on Brecht, were very good. That on Benjamin was from a foreword to the collection of Benjamin essays titled Illuminations, but I thought it would serve as a pretty good introduction to Benjamin, even if you didn't go on to read that particular book. And her essay on Brecht was even better: it was a piece from the New Yorker ten years after Brecht died, and was looking at the state of his reputation at that time, the relationship between his poetry and his politics. Brecht died in a somewhat bad odor; he had been chased out of the United States after World War II for his (never very doctrinaire) communism, and further chased out of West Germany, ending up in East Germany. He was unhappy and unproductive there and most likely afraid in those last years of Stalin. Arendt, the great scholar and opponent of all totalitarianism, sensitively considers the relationship of the work to the political morality of the artist. I wondered to what extent this also reflected her thoughts on Heidegger, who had been her teacher--and lover--in between the world wars, but was later a Nazi supporter.

Recommended particularly for the essay on Brecht.

Margaret Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian

"I fell to making, and then re-making, this portrait of a man almost wise."

I admit to being uncertain about this book until at least halfway through. I mostly kept reading it because it came highly recommended. (This means you, O!) At one point, though, I told The Other Reader (who had read it before we were even a couple, had liked it, but had half forgotten it) that it was like 'a campaign biography. It's just a resumé of all the good things Hadrian had done and wants to do.' I may even have accused Yourcenar of being French, and thus incapable of irony. But I was wrong...

The quote above (from the afterword in my edition, 'Reflections On The Composition') is a bit of a clue. Yourcenar definitely admires Hadrian, but is capable of seeing his limitations. It's actually a fairly subtle portrait.

The work is structured as a letter from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, emperor-to-be, and is in her understanding of the voice of Hadrian, and, of course, to Hadrian himself what he does is reasonable and wise. Hadrian dutifully intends to do well by the empire. Now this does lead to statements like:

"I put the finishing touches to the long and complex reorganization of imperial domains in Asia Minor; the peasants were the better off for it, and the State, too."

or, of the reconstruction of a library in Athens:

"Particular attention had been paid to the choice of lamps, and to their placing."

Which makes him sound like a well-intentioned, but micro-managing, Jimmy Carter. And he kind of is.

A bit of background: Hadrian is the middle of the so-called 'Five Good Emperors,' who ruled Rome from 96 AD to 180 AD. After the mad incompetence of Nero and Claudius, and the harsh tyranny of Domitian, this was almost a century of relatively stable and somewhat tolerant rule; Hadrian himself was emperor from 117 to 138 AD. Marcus Aurelius, the recipient of the memoirs, was the last of those five emperors and the adoptive grandson of Hadrian. Hadrian takes over from Trajan, who expanded the empire, and enters into a period of consolidation.

Also Hadrian was almost certainly homosexual or bisexual, and Yourcenar presents him as such.

Now the idea that this is a letter to Marcus Aurelius fades a bit as you go along; well, even in pre-Tweet days, a letter of 300 pages would be a bit improbable. And as the book ends with Hadrian dying, presumably he's not writing a letter at that point. Hadrian starts his discourse mentioning his illness (dropsy or edema) which Hadrian knows will kill him, but then backs up to go through the course of his life. What impact did his childhood in Spain have? The loss of his natural father?  What is his relationship with Trajan, his predecessor and adoptive father? This presents a less secure, but still vigorous Hadrian. Then when he becomes emperor, what are his plans and visions for the state? The two quotes above come from that phase, and are a fair sample of Hadrian in his prime. But later the sick and tired Hadrian comes to the fore, and this was in some ways the most engaging, as Hadrian reckons with what he had done, and what his legacy was likely to be.

My edition has a fifteen page bibliographic note, and it's clear Yourcenar has done her homework. She means for this to be a real representation of Hadrian's inner life as far as we can know it, and, though we can't ever know for sure, I have to say, it really works. Even if that does include a bit of boring, but successful, do-gooding-ness in the middle of his life.

The two main early sources for the life of Hadrian are Dio Cassius, and The Augustan History. I immediately went off and started the latter...

I pulled this off the shelf for Meytal's Women In Translation month, but didn't quite finish it in time, though I've been hacking away at this post for a while now. It covers France--Yourcenar was born in Belgium, but mostly grew up in France, and was the first woman elected to the French Academy--for my Europe reading challenge, hosted at Rose City Reader.

I had a few other ideas for this post, but it's taken me long enough already!

Poem For A Thursday: Tsvetaeva

I'm still alive. That may be soon
a sin. Perhaps these days to live
is not the human thing to do.
Perhaps this age is iron and all
must fall. Perhaps it's not the poet
anymore who writes the poem.

-Marina Tsvetaeva

(tr. Paul Schmidt)

This poem of Marina Tsvetaeva dates from 1918; I'm afraid her life got only worse from there, and the poem was all too prophetic. Her husband was killed by the Soviet regime in 1941; she herself committed suicide soon after.

One last poem themed for Women in Translation month, hosted by Biblibio. 

I'm scheduling this post in advance, but here's hoping Jennifer (the founder of Poem for a Thursday) has posted something new.

Poem For A Thursday: Beatritz de Dia

Estat ai en greu cossirier

I have been in heavy thought
over a cavalier I'd had.
I want it clear to everyone
that I've loved him to excess,
and now I see he's left me: pre-
text, I refused him my love.
I seem to be mistaken, then,
as to what was going on,
dressed or in bed.

I'd love to hold my cavalier
naked one evening in my arms,
he would think he were on fire
if I'd be his pillow then.
For I burn more for him than
Floris did for Blancheflor,
deliver him my love, my heart, my
sensuality, my eyes, my life.

My dear and lovely friend, if ever
I come to have you in my power
and get into bed with you one night
and give you love-kiss, know it:
I'd have such a great desire
to hold you in my husband's place,
if you'd promise to do
everything I'd want you to.

-Beatritz de Dia

(tr. Paul Blackburn)

Beatritz de Dia was a troubadour poet of the second half of the 12th century. The following vida dates from a couple of centuries later:

The countess of Dia was the wife of William of Poitou and a good and beautiful lady. She was in love with Raimbault d'Aurenga and made him many good songs.

The notes suggest even that even that brief bit of biographical information can't really be trusted. There are a half-dozen surviving poems.

Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness is featuring Emily Dickinson this week.

Poem For A Thursday: Akhmatova

The Stray Dog Cabaret

All of us here are hookers and hustlers.
We drink too much, and don't care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
that have never seen sunshine or air. 

You smoke too much. There's always a cloud
of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt? I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg. 

The windows here have been covered forever.
Is it snowing out?...maybe it's rain.
You've got that look in your eyes again,
like a cat in a crouch for a kill. 

Sometimes I feel this awful pain
as if someone were breaking a spell.
Take a good look at that one over there!
She's dancing her way into hell!

-Anna Akhmatova (tr. Paul Schmidt)

The Stray Dog Cabaret was an actual location in St. Petersburg where Akhmatova, as well as Blok, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, among others, hung out in the years immediately before World War I. This poem dates from 1913. 

Akhmatova lived on until 1966, though her first husband was executed by the Soviet police and her second died in the Gulag. She was nominated several times for the Nobel prize.

This poem has a certain happy bravado; that was not the norm in her life. This is from 1917:

This is the moment they told us would come some day
when there's nobody left alive to hear what we say.
The world is no longer the place it used to be.
Be still, don't break my heart. Be silent, poetry.

Jennifer is featuring Sylvia Plath this week. Brona has a timely Herman Melville.

War and the Iliad (#WITMonth)

"It is hopeless to look in the Iliad for a condemnation of war as such. People make war, they put up with it, they curse it, they even praise it in songs and verses, but it is not to be judged any more than destiny is." 

-Rachel Bespaloff

A very serious Humpty engaged in some
late night lucubrations.

Despite that...there might yet be some judgment on war in this volume.

War and the Iliad, a New York Review Books reissue, contains two essays--by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff--about Homer's Iliad, written in the early years of World War II.

Weil's essay is the first out and the first in this volume; it's published in Vichy France in the winter of 1940/41. The title is 'The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,' and it begins: "The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away..."

Rachel Bespaloff was already working on her own essay 'On the Iliad' at this time, though she seems to have read Weil's before finishing her own; hers came out in French in 1943.

Both essays are more about the times than the Iliad, though I would say this was particularly true of Weil's. I don't know that I felt Weil was that insightful about Homer's text, but it was powerful and moving about war. It's often considered an anti-war or pacifist document, and while it is certainly anti-war, it's too despairing to be pacifist, I'd say; to argue for pacifism implies a measure of hope that something can be done.

The quote from Bespaloff above is I think partly in response to Weil, but I also think it's closer to the spirit of the author of the Iliad. Homer is not under any illusions as to what war is really like; he does not romanticize it; but it is material for stories; it is possible to behave well in wartime, though so very often men do not.

Both were translated into English by Mary McCarthy with idea that they would be published in one volume, but rights for Weil's essay were unavailable in 1947 so Bespaloff's essay with an afterword by Hermann Broch came out in an edition with Bollingen press. New York Review Books was able to put together the two essays with Broch's afterword and added an introduction by Christopher Benfey in 2005.

I had assembled a lovely pile of novels I thought I could read for #WITMonth, but I'm still thinking about Hermann Broch and I knew this had that final essay by him so that's what came of the top of the stack. I'm still hopeful that at least one of those novels gets read this month, but I also pulled Hannah Arendt's Men In Dark Times off the shelf because it has an essay on Hermann Broch. Half the Arendt volume's essays were originally in English, but half were translated from the German, including the essay on Broch, making it another possible #WITMonth book. I've already read the Broch essay.

And Weil and Bespaloff made me want to reread the Iliad. I was going to wait for the Emily Wilson translation, since I so much enjoyed her Odyssey, but now I may not be willing to wait.

Poem For A Thursday: Szymborska

In Praise Of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean. 

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right? 

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
In every other way they're light. 

On this third planet of the sun
Among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is number one.

-Wislawa Szymborska 

(tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)

Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet who passed away in 2012. It's WIT (Women in Translation) Month!

Holds Upon Happiness, the originator of Poem For A Thursday, has previously featured a different poem of  Szymborska.

Valeria Luiselli's Sidewalks

"When the trip was over and I reread my notes, I swore I'd never write anything about Venice, simply because there's nothing more vulgar and futile than encouraging the production of even one more page about the city,...Writing about Venice is like emptying a glass of water into the sea."

From the second of two essays at least peripherally about Venice in Valeria Luiselli's book of essays Sidewalks. Ahem. She may be capable of irony.

In the opening essay, Luiselli visits Brodsky's grave in the cemetery of San Michele in Venice. After some searching, she finds it, giving her the opportunity to ponder dead Venetians and encounter living ones.

Most of the essays are at least partly concerned with place. I don't really know her biography, but from this she was born in Mexico City, lived for a while in Central America as a young girl, and in India as a teenager, and now in Manhattan. In one of the best essays she bicycles around a neighborhood in Mexico City while pondering the meaning of the Portuguese word saudade. (Meaning roughly melancholy? Or maybe not.)

They touch on longing and loss, though are also often funny. Why is it the young are so given to, and often so good at, melancholy? They can still afford it, I guess. I spent much of my late teens moping myself, listening to Townes van Zandt.

Authors mentioned by Luiselli: Joseph Brodsky, W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Fernando Pessoa, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Wittgenstein, Lichtenberg, Borges, Cervantes. If that list of authors sounds good to you, you're going to like this. It does for me and I did.

It was published by Coffee House Press in 2014. It seems ably translated by Christina MacSweeney.

I'd heard of her before, no longer sure where, but I decided to read this now because she was coming to Toronto for an #AppelSalon event. In the end the event was cancelled. Now I'm regretting that. Her novel Faces in the Crowd is on its way to my local library.

Eileen Chang's Love In A Fallen City

Shanghai's clocks were set an hour ahead so the city could "save daylight," but the Bai family said, "We go by the old clock." Ten o'clock to them was eleven to everyone else. Their singing was behind the beat; they couldn't keep up with the huqin of life.

That's the opening paragraph of the title story in this collection of Eileen Chang stories Love In A Fallen City. It gives a good sense: these six stories are about families, mostly stuck in tradition. People refer to others by their place in the family hierarchy: Second Master, Fourth Mistress, Third Sister. The men are incompetently in charge; the women, trying to scrape up a little power by whatever means. The young of both sexes are trying to get out from under. For the girls, prostitution is an available option. Money is tight, but opium is readily available. Generally nobody gets what they want.

The stories take place in either Shanghai or Hong Kong, or both, in the years leading up to and then including the Japanese occupation; the stories were written (in Chinese) during the occupation and slipped past the censors. They're apolitical and generally don't mention the Japanese. They give a sense of how much and how fast China was changing in those years, though mostly without the cooperation of the characters.

My favorite was the title story. Bai Liusu has divorced her husband and returned home because he beat her. The Bai family take her back in, but they grumble about it, and when her ex-husband dies, they suggest Liusu return to her husband's family and take the role of widow. She refuses.

A family friend, Mrs. Xu, takes Liusu to Hong Kong; maybe there she can meet a male protector. But what will be her role? Will she be his wife, his legal concubine, his whore? Liusu doesn't really trust Mrs. Xu to do the right thing for her, and Liusu's position is delicate. She meets Fan Liuyuan, who's interested in her; he's kind enough and rich enough. Liusu is willing to accept legal concubinage, she figures she's twenty-eight, divorced and widowed, but wishes for more. First Hong Kong falls to the Japanese, then Shanghai. Everything is in chaos, the couple are reduced to living in poverty in an occupied city--and it's still the happiest story in the collection.

Grim, but I thought they were very good. New York Review Books have reissued at least two of her novels as well. I'm now likely to read them.

Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone

"Where can a person go when he doesn't know where to go?"

The protagonist of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a retired professor of classics who spent most of his professional career at a university in East Berlin. He's a lonely man. Widowed and childless, he has friends, but at first even they seem to be drifting away. He had a mistress, which made the marriage not an entire success, but now she's gone, too. At the beginning of the novel he's just wrapped up all the rituals of retirement.

He passes, without at first noticing, a protest in a Berlin plaza; a group of African refugees are living in the plaza, Occupy Wall Street-style, trying to draw attention to their plight, and maybe acquire residency and work permits. Richard sees the events on television he'd scarcely noticed in person, but decides to draw up a plan for a sociological inquiry, and uses his emeritus status to get the authority to pursue it. Does he mean to do actual research? Not really. It's just to satisfy his curiosity and give him something to do.

And not a lot happens. He interviews refugees. He becomes more involved, maybe does some good, assuages his own loneliness a bit. The novel ends with the refugees no better off than they were 250 pages earlier, but at least not sent back to Italy, where there is poco lavoro, nor to their various home countries in Africa, where they would be at risk of their lives. They've fought the German bureaucracy and didn't win, but at least weren't utterly routed.

Why do we read novels? There's no one answer to that question, of course. There are different answers for different people and even different moods. I read Mrs. Pollifax on Safari a couple of days ago, and today this--very different, and enjoyed both. Sometimes I read for story, or for escape. But then one of the reasons I read novels is to experience and understand the problems of societies, both of others and of mine own. This novel is as close to purely political, even didactic as almost anything I've read, and yet it's still powerful and affecting; part of that comes from the deep, lonely sadness of Richard as he claws his way back into something like life.

Go, Went, Gone came out in German in 2015 and the translation by Susan Bernofsky came out in English last year. Germany is one of the better European countries on accepting immigrants, or at least Angela Merkel made it so, pledging to take in a million asylum-seekers, quite possibly it seems at the cost of her political career and the rise of the party Alternativ für Deutschland. And yet, at least according to Erpenbeck, maybe not all that welcoming. I don't quite know the timeline of all this because I believe it was also 2015 when Merkel made her pledge, so it's likely Erpenbeck was looking at Germany before Merkel's action. In any case the novel shows plenty of institutional resistance to admitting refugees.

Canada patted itself on the back for taking in just 25,000 Syrian refugees (and I entirely approved of that). As for the U.S., well...

A fascinating book.

She's German and it's very caught up with contemporary Germany, so it definitely fits...

Dubravka Ugresic

"I admit my head's a bit muddled from the trauma known as Eastern Europe..."

Dubravka Ugresic came to Toronto's public library as part of its Appel Salon series on Friday. The Other Reader and I have been enjoying these events over the last couple of years, and though neither of us had read any Ugresic we decided to go. I assigned myself two books of hers as homework: Fox and Thank You For Not Reading.

I picked the two books at random. Since I had no real knowledge, but wanted to read them in advance, I chose books I could get right away. The Toronto Public Library has a half dozen copies of Fox, her most recent in English, from earlier this year; Thank You For Not Reading came out in English in 2003, and just happened to be available.

Ugresic won the Neustadt Prize in 2016, an author prize that has, I think, a pretty good track record. She's from Croatia, now lives in Amsterdam, and has a, umm, complicated relationship with her country of birth: she left in 1993 after she was harassed and threatened for being insufficiently 'patriotic' during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Thank You For Not Reading is a collection of what seem to be occasional essays. My Dalkey Press edition (tr. by Celia Hawkesworth) doesn't give any information about their source, though each of them has a date at the end, ranging from 1996 to 2000. The sections each begin with an epigraph from Winnie-the-Pooh featuring Eeyore, which gives you some idea of Ugresic' mood at the time. Though she does say in the introduction to this edition that were she writing them at that time (2002) she might be a little less Eeyore-ish.

She also says the book is half fiction, though she doesn't identify which half...The essays are about being a writer, the publishing industry, and particularly being a writer in exile. They're uneven. But many are quite funny, and the best are also successfully thoughtful, particularly 'The Writer in Exile.' Occasionally I thought her targets a little easy: did you know (or care) Ivana Trump has written a novel? Me neither. Though that particular essay did pack a double whammy. It seems the same issue of the New York Times that panned Joseph Brodsky's Watermark praised Ivana Trump's novel.

The other weird thing about this book was how badly it was proofread. It was so egregious, I almost wondered if there wasn't some subtle joke going on. Paulo Coelho's name was spelled three different ways, and the French theoretician was identified as 'HBL (Bernard-Henry Levy),' just like that, with the name and contradictory initials right next to each other.

Then I read Fox, her most recent and, I thought, the better book. In fact, a very good book. It's labeled a novel, though the narrator is very much like Dubravka Ugresic, and in discussion at the library, Ugresic simply said the narrator was her. It's divided into six sections and each section she meets or discusses somebody who may be real--or may not--or may be half real and half made up. These figures are all associated with the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century and range from the very real Boris Pilnyak, whom Ugresic went to Moscow to study before the fall of communism, to the somewhat real DoivBer Levin, a Russian avant-garde writer whose works were lost, to Levin's widow and daughter, who may never have existed at all. At the talk she said that's how it is with other people in our lives: they pass through, you know them only partly and wrongly, and then they're gone. We're all just footnotes to some convoluted, only partly understood story.

As I say, I liked this a lot. You have to like books about writers, books that are melancholy about things lost. But if you do, things like W. G. Sebald's, or Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, I highly recommend this.

"...if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then the person's tribe is accursed. The fox is the writer's totem."

In person, Ugresic is funny and a bit crotchety at things that deserve a good crotchet. About like she is in her books.

A note on spelling. Wikipedia wants to put a caron over the S and a grave accent over the C. Both the English translations I have drop those, though. By the principle of lectio difficilior I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is right, but I couldn't figure out how to type the S with a caron anyway...

This covers Croatia for my Europe challenge, though I'm pretty sure Ugresic would not be pleased. From Thank You For Not Reading:

"At literary gatherings I feel as though I were at the Eurovision song contest and am suddenly anxious that after my reading or talk I will hear a gong and a voice announcing: Croatia, five points. I dream that one day I shall remove the stickers that other people have assiduously attached to me and become just my name. Because that, just a name, is the greatest literary recognition that any writer can earn. For everyone else: Cyprus, five points; Poland, two points; Belgium, ten points..."

Muriel Barbery's The Life Of Elves

"You see, this is a tale, of course, but it is also the truth."

The Life of Elves (2015, 2016 for the English translation) is Muriel Barbery's third book, and her first after the enormous success of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

That's always a tough place to be, and without making a very thorough search, I think the general feeling is that it was a falling off from her previous one.

But I liked it better. And I liked the previous one.

It's a story of two changeling girls, Maria raised in France, and Clara raised in Italy. They have mystical powers that need nourishing and mystical enemies that need to be kept away until they've matured enough to face them. The first of their challenges ends the first book; there's supposed to be a second involving the same characters.

I think Barbery has pretty successfully captured a folk tale atmosphere in this. It favorably reminded me of Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin or ballads like 'Thomas the Rhymer' and 'Tam Lin.' But at the same time she's using that atmosphere to go after her usual philosophical concerns. Now it's true there are places where the prose felt convoluted, and I assume that's there in the French. Alison Anderson, who translated both her earlier books, also translated this, as well as other authors, and she seems to me to be good at it. I can't imagine she introduced the convolutions of her own.

It is certainly more mystical and less funny than her previous books; well, that probably goes with the fairy tale territory. But the secondary characters were engaging, maybe particularly the Italian maestro, the French priest, and the drunken warrior. I'll be reading the sequel when I can.

And now I want preserved chanterelle pie! When the French family decides on a big country meal for a strategy session, that's what they serve.

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance Of The Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is Muriel Barbery's second novel. It came out in French in 2006, won several awards, and was a huge success; it was translated into English by Alison Anderson in 2008, where it also succeeded, and led to her first novel Gourmet Rhapsody coming out in English a year later.

It's told in two alternating voices, that of Renée, the widowed concierge of a hôtel particulier, (a high-end condo as far as I can tell) and of Paloma, the twelve-year-old daughter of one of the rich residents of the hôtel. Both are preternaturally thoughtful and well-read, and both are determined to hide that fact. Renée listens to Mahler and reads Marx, but knows that no slothful, irritable concierge can be seen doing any such thing. Paloma can see no way to use her haiku-writing and her disdain; she plans to commit suicide on her next birthday.

And both do hide their intelligence and their goals and their dissatisfactions, until a rich Japanese man, Kokuro Ozu, buys a vacant floor, and sees through the both of them.

It's the voices in this that make it work. It's a funny book--but alas all too accurate--about the fact that smart people, and especially smart women, find it socially difficult to demonstrate and use in public their intelligence. Especially true, as in the case of Renée, where the class background is 'inappropriate.' Each of the two women present the events of the story (which overlap) in little mini-essays that are intelligent and thoughtful and funny.

But I do feel the plot needed some work in this. There is one, but it starts late and then rushes to a not very satisfactory conclusion. Paloma has an insufficiently justified epiphany that makes things OK again for her; Renée's fate was equally rushed and unjustified by events.

Still I found it amusing and insightful enough that I got the new one by Barbery (The Life Of Elves) from the library, where it will be the subject of the next book club meeting at my local branch.

It also fits WomenInTranslation month, which, though I hadn't planned it, I'm proud to now be part of.

Herta Müller's The Land of Green Plums

Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud
that's how it is with friends where the world is full of fear
even my mother said, that's how it is
friends are out of the question
think of more serious things.

--Gellu Naum

This poem, or part of a poem,--I'm uncertain--serves as the epigraph to Müller's novel, but it is also quoted by the narrator and her friends at several points in the novel. Müller's novel is a story of friends in a world of fear.

Herta Müller was born in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania in 1953, which was certainly a world of fear. To compound problems, she was part of the German-speaking minority. She got herself in trouble with Romania's secret police, the Securitate, was mostly unable to publish, and was turfed out of her job as a technical translator. She got out to Germany in 1987. This novel appeared there in 1993, and was translated by Michael Hofmann into English in 1996.

My edition includes the speech she gave for her 2009 win of the Nobel Prize in Literature; the novel follows, it seems, pretty closely the events of her life. The narrator, too, gets out, but her friends are not necessarily so lucky. I thought it was a fairly effective presentation of a quite dark, but important story.

The prose is curiously flat. Here's an example, chosen more or less at random:

Between winter and spring I heard about five corpses that got snagged on reeds in the river outside the city. Everybody talked about them, as if they were talking about the dictator's illnesses. They shook their heads and shuddered. Kurt, too.

Michael Hofmann is a major translator, and I assume this represents the German accurately. I didn't go check, not that my German is good enough to do so. But it does feel right: something stylistically more elaborate might very well not be suitable for the subject. The narrator and the other characters are from small-town Romania; they're bright and want to get an education and move to the city, dangerous as that may be, but they are not initially sophisticated. They come across some contraband German books from Germany:

The books in the summerhouse had been smuggled into the country. They were written in German, our mother tongue, the one in which the wind lay down. Not the official language of the country. But not quite the children's bedtime language of the village either. The books were in our mother tongue, but the silence of the villages, which forbids thought, wasn't in them. We imagined the land where the books came from as a land of thinkers.

Her book brings back into German the silence of the villages.

It's the only Herta Müller I've read, so I can't compare, but I would read another. It may be a while, though. I'm not sure I can bear to read about life under maniacal fascist dictators very much just at the moment.