In his essay “Edgar Jené and the Dream About the Dream,” the Bukovina-born poet Paul Celan addresses the defilement of language and the spirit through “evil and injustice in the world”; and he proposes a corrective: not in the unlikely rationality-induced return to an ahistorical state of “original grace,” but in the poetic renewal and freedom generated by collisions of “words and figures from the remotest regions of the spirit… images and gestures, veiled and unveiled as in a dream…”:

 

When they meet in their heady course, and the spark of the wonderful is born from the marriage of strange and most strange, then I will know I am facing the new radiance. [1]

 

Celan’s early poetry, in both Romanian and German, germinated in this surreal radiance before he began grappling with the geo-etymological sources of his later work; but he was not the only postwar (South-) Eastern European poet to engage the imagination and language of surrealism, often combined with those of inherited folk traditions (one distinguishing factor from the French movement), in response to historical trauma. A similar oneiric alchemy is operative in the poetry of other mid-century Romanians like Gellu Naum, Gherasim Luca, Eugen Jebeleanu, and Nichita Stanescu, as well as the Yugoslavs Vasko Popa, Dane Zajc, Novica Tadić, and Tomaž Šalamun, and the Greek Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis; so it is not surprising that the Greeks’ younger compatriot Miltos Sachtouris (1919–2005) shared this engagement. His Poems 1945–1971, translated by Karen Emmerich and published not so very long ago by Archipelago Books, demonstrates an affiliation with this broad family of twentieth-century European poets, many of whom — unlike Sachtouris, so far at least — are very well known to American readers and writers.

 

Emmerich, in her brief, but highly informative afterword, addresses what she calls the “cumulative madness” of Sachtouris’s work, the “paralogical perspective that keeps coming at the world — or fleeing from it — at an angle.” She tempers the critical tendency to ascribe this to the influence of surrealism by pointing to alternative readings that see the “nightmarish quality” of his poems as realist — an immediate response to the experience of the occupation and the war — and by herself emphasizing moments of optimism in his poetry and of reflection on the poet’s vocation. John Taylor, in his Into the Heart of European Poetry, perceptively suggests that the “reader puzzling over Sachtouris’s disarming mixture of apparent eyewitness account and apparent hallucination should take the poet seriously when, in ‘The Dream,’ he quotes Céline, who graphically depicted First World War manslaughter yet claimed that his ‘voyage was fully imaginary — whence its force.’” [2] I indeed found myself puzzled, perhaps stunned is the better word, by this tension between the horrific and the euphoric in Sachtouris’s poetry; although I was also thrown from the start by the contrast between the book’s cheery, canary yellow-and-crimson cover and its opening poem, “The Difficult Sunday” (1945), which begins in a fever of figurativeness — “Since morning, I’ve gazed up at a better bird / since morning I’ve enjoyed the snake coiled at my neck” — and ends with the grimly sober assessment:

 

It was freezing

I no longer know what time they all died

leaving me with a dismembered friend

and a bloody branch for company

 

The shock of these contrasts repeats itself throughout the book, concussively.

 

Severed hands and heads, shattering eyes, guns, withered or malevolent flowers, mutilated bodies, dead people, blood, death, darkness, and monsters all frequent these deeply imagistic poems. Taylor points to Sachtouris’s obsession with color and images and sees an answer to the enigma of his poetry in the work of Greek painter Alekos Fassianos. But Sachtouris’s relation to the visual seems to me equally assignable to the experience of dreams, the poems being structured along chains of association and condensation, with certain colors and very forceful images recurring insistently, apparently by dint of their traumatic power.

 

Blood, for instance, is repeated more often than any other trope throughout the selection. So we find lines like “winning ideal lotteries of blood,” “Flooded with the blood of birds,” “a bloody stone in his brain,” “little streams / that washed the blood away,” “Bloody veal / blocks out / the sky,” “all day my garden sprouted / blood,” “people with skies full of rotten blood,” “the sky is a garden full / of blood,” “hearts dripped blood the crazy hare,” “I drive the siren mad I sow my blood.” The insistence on the word collapses the image of blood into the sign, an effect that is nowhere more evident than in the semantic satiation of the early poem “Hydra” (1948) which begins “They hung my blood from the branches / they cast my blood into the sea,” then compulsively reiterates the word blood in almost every line (Sachtouris’s birthplace, the island of Hydra was especially hard hit by the famine of 1941–42). Other structures occur, however, in which the visual predominates in metaphoric form, such as “red roses suddenly / sprouted / where mouths should have been.” And one also finds concatenations of the verbal sign in a complex figure, both metaphoric and metonymic: “the ashen girl among the carnations / collects blood drop by drop,” “a snow of glass confetti fell / bloodying the hearts,” or “I give no blood to the veins of birds.”

 

Sachtouris’s metaphoric capability sometimes achieves a stunning compression, as in “The Dreams” (1962) for instance:

 

The graves are happy

 

the dreams always pass

through the graves

then charge

shooting into the air

bursting open and whistling

 

at times like these they forget death

they forget all about it

 

Elsewhere, his language is more discursive; and in many cases may be understood, as Emmerich points out, as a “meditation on what it means to be a poet in difficult times,” or simply as giving an account of himself, as another poem from his 1962 volume Stigmata, “Excerpt From My Own Personal Winter,” shows:

 

When at night

I talk to dead cocks

to sleeping clouds

in the kingdom of ash

the edge of this year’s fierce

white snow

exposes me

fleshless

drunk

untarnished

but

I don’t cry

for the beautiful dream

for the bad dream

that for years now each night

has tortured me in my sleep

has tortured me every day

of my life

 

The precision and economy of these translations is apparent, as is Emmerich’s unflagging intuition for rhythm, gravity, and an English that is simultaneously austere and vibrant. Aside from one slim and difficult-to-find chapbook published in Great Britain in 1984, this is the only collection of Sachtouris’s poetry available in English. Its comprehensiveness (over two hundred poems) and the excellence of Emmerich’s work make it an important landmark on the map of European poetry in English translation.

 

Excerpts from the review by George Kalamaras
Rain Taxi, Vol. 12, No. 1 – Spring 2007

 

One of the most important English translations of international poetry in recent years.

…

To say that Emmerich’s translation is significant and timely is an understatement, particularly in our own time of ‘continuous’ war.

…

Color functions as both beacon and wound for Sachtouris, a complex palette that foregrounds nuances of desperation while simultaneously offering a means of redemption: to gaze face-first into our own blood, into the color of our cultural darkness is an act of loving, albeit painful, attention.

…

Poems (1945-1971) is a remarkable collection from one of Greece’s most important poets. Its significance as cultural history is itself enough to recommend this book. It also serves as literary history, giving us another embodiment of Surrealism to help dispel to myth of a monolithic movement inherited from France. Sachtouris also helps transform the nature of the ‘political’ poem into something less topical and, rather, psychological—further evidence of the relevance of the project of Surrealism in our current time.

 

 

Excerpts from Christopher Bakken’s review of Sachtouris, as published in Pleiades:

 

1.
…the typical Sachtouris poem occurs in a place we don’t recognize as Greece, that we’re not sure we recognize as being real at all, except that like our world it is brimming with extraordinary objects and beasts.  Each poem is a nearly shattered utterance, un-punctuated, devoid of narrative, and deliberately bizarre; it proceeds according to a logic of associations we aren’t meant to decode, is saturated with metamorphosis and duende, and is held together by a scaffolding of garish and violent images:

Bad mother
with your pinned-on eyes
your wide nailed-on mouth
and your seven fingers
you grab your baby and caress it
then stretch your white arms before you
and the sky burns them with its golden rain

(“Height of February”)

At a moment when our own poetry is once again exploring methods of composition that in certain quarters are called “experimental” or “avant-garde,” the appearance of Emmerich’s volume on English-speaking soil is also timely and pertinent.  Many young American practitioners might suddenly discover they have a strange Greek uncle in the under-appreciated Miltos Sachtouris…

 

2.
In Sachtouris’s poems, Death and Silence enact a noisy, erotic courtship and one context for these poems is indeed the corrosive effect of that bad marriage upon Greece, but in the latter half of the twentieth century, there is no Greek poet as reticent as Sachtouris.  As he puts it,

A strange forest bewitches my voice
each word is a drop of blood
my whole song is a tree
watered with the blood of murderers
thousands of murderers thousands of wild trees

(“Under the Sky”)

So bewitched, Sachtouris prefers enigmas and shape-shifting, a magically real landscape populated by “phantom caiques,” “butterfly-dogs,” and “bloody flowers.”  Only very rarely, in between his incorrigibly joyful and Technicolor mayhem, do we suspect that the poet is revealing himself, confessing “I didn’t expect/ hell/ to be so bright” (“Moments”) or “I don’t cry/ for the beautiful dream/ for the bad dream/ that for years now each night/ has tortured me in my sleep” (“Excerpt from my Own Personal Winter”)…

 

3.

The project of bringing a poet this guarded and obtuse from Greek into English could not have been an easy one….  The difficulty has to do with Sachtouris’ compression and the tendency of his poems to stagger from image to image, jolting their way down the page by way of a maddeningly flexible syntax that is possible in Greek, but not in English.
Emmerich was clearly willing to retain this fragmentary aspect of Sachtouris’s style, but her real achievement is in creating poems in English that manage to proceed down the page with a double-jointed agility that isn’t exactly graceful, but is just jaunty enough to suggest a tension between the violence of the imagery and the playfulness of Sachtouris’s psyche…

 

 

Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost poets in Greece, but, unlike other Greek poets such as George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, he has been slow to receive world recognition. Karen Emmerich’s new translation into English of poems mainly from the middle period of Sachtouris’s long career promises to rectify this. Sachtouris is a political poet, one of the most stalwart opponents of the Greek dictatorship of 1967-1974. Poems like “History” show the individual struggling to escape the terror wrought by political authority. Sachtouris’s rejoinder is a celebration of the full panoply of existence. He takes a quirky delight in the incongruities of life. In “Harmony,” Sachtouris pictures boats and trees as being as dissatisfied with their identities as most humans are. His most famous poem, “The Crazy Hare,” summons a hare running through the street as a spectre of death. Often, Sachtouris’s vistas are apocalyptic. “Hidden” imagines transcendence exploding from within death and triumphing over it. “The Gold” uses the image of a blue cart against a field of gold to picture the earth’s eventual destruction by the exploding sun. “The Sun Beautiful One Day,” on the same theme of the blowing-up of the sun, deploys an unusual combination of surreal, spontaneous poetics with a discipline that presents clear, resonant images in short, almost severe forms. It is rare that a Sachtouris poem occupies over a page.

 

Sachtouris, though, is not just an imagist or a poet of the object. In “The Fever of Joy” he describes passionate joy with the specificity usually associated with an outward referent. A great admirer of Dylan Thomas, Sachtouris’s language is not as flamboyant as the Welsh poet’s. But in poems like “The Wounded Spring,” he evinces a similar sensitivity to both the healing and the pain that are part of life.

 

 

THIS little book, originally published in Zurich in 1936, six years before Musil’s death, is full of what the author called “the passionate energy of the idea.” It is a collection of small stories and observations, like Musil’s effort to feel what flies feel when stuck on flypaper: “Here they stand all stiffly erect … like decrepit old soldiers (and a little bowlegged, the way you stand on a sharp edge).” Or the beautiful piece titled “Clearhearing,” in which he describes his feverishly heightened hearing as he listens to his lover in the next room getting ready to join him in bed. And there is the essay “The Man Without Character,” containing the seeds of the poet-philosopher’s great opus, “The Man Without Qualities.” This is as essential, as close to the bone, as the written word can get: “Light doesn’t shine on this and that, but spills out over everything as from an accidentally overturned bucket.”

 

One of my prized books is a battered, used copy of the first volume of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. On the cover, the Wall Street Journal calls it one of the 20th century’s three greatest novels (the other two, according to the blurb, are Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time). Inside the cover, just across from this quote, is a big black stamp from the Fairfax County Public Library: WITHDRAWN BECAUSE OF LOW DEMAND.

 

Musil would probably have smiled at this — and then, like any writer, been thrown into a deep depression. Low demand plagued him his entire life, and has ever since. There are some obvious reasons for this. His greatest novel, The Man Without Qualities, is the sort of enormous book that one is never in the mood to start, not only because of the density of the prose and the lack of any real narrative drive, but also because Musil died before he finished; the second volume ends in hundreds of pages of fragments, and who wants to go on a journey with no destination?

 

In 1936, as these drafts proliferated, Musil probably realized that his great book might never be completed. In two more years, he would move from Austria to Switzerland to escape the Nazis (their takeover had already forced him leave Berlin in 1933). He would continue working on the novel, as he had done for over a decade, but it must have been difficult to re-enter a world that dealt with the quaint absurdities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, defunct since 1918, while Europe prepared to plunge into another war.

 

It was then, in 1936, that a Swiss publisher asked him if it could publish a collection of his old stories and articles, and Musil agreed, while clearly having reservations about some of the material. “To publish nothing but little tales and observations amidst a thundering, groaning world,” he writes in the introduction, “to speak of incidentals when there are so many vital issues; to vent one’s anger at phenomena that lie far off the beaten track: this may doubtless appear as weakness to some, and I will readily admit that I had all kinds of doubts regarding the decision to publish.”

 

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author begins with a section called “Pictures,” which features a series of sketches; some are short stories, others just observations about things like horses and a village funeral. The writing here, some of Musil’s earliest published work, is polished, but almost nothing stuck with me: a surreal vignette about monkeys is clearly influenced by Kafka, but doesn’t have the same density or metaphorical weight; any number of little prose poems float by without making a dent. Only a few memorable sentences remain, like these from an essay on waking up at dawn: “I discover strange fellows, the smokestacks. In groups of three, five, seven and sometimes alone, they stand up on the rooftops; like trees in a landscape. Space winds around them and into the deep.”

 

Quite lovely, but this is the sort of thing that makes impatient librarians reach for their stamps. Except for the first essay, a strangely moving description of flies dying on flypaper, these are the doodles of a talented artist; Musil’s mature voice is completely absent. To my relief, in the next few sections — consisting of essays, very short stories, and finally a longer story — we hear this voice emerge, and also have the rare, thrilling pleasure of watching an author rise from ordinary talent to greatness. Even the translation gets better! The earlier sections are dotted with baffling sentences and obvious errors: missing words, elementary blunders in usage — pealed for peeled, timber for timbre — but as the blood starts moving through the writing, these progressively get cleared away.

 

The essays deal with a variety of topics: the German love of nature; art and kitsch; public monuments; people’s need to send postcards. They are the sort of mini-essays that appear throughout The Man Without Qualities. In the first few pieces, one can see Musil’s mathematical intelligence struggle to translate itself into prose (for one essay, to my slight aggravation, I had to write equations to figure out his argument), and then become the precise, flexible instrument used in his great work. In the process, incredibly, he starts having fun. Some of the essays, like the one on monuments, are like profound little stand-up comedy routines. As with all those other daunting modernist books — by Joyce, Proust, Kafka — that are presented like doses of medicine at universities, Musil turns out to be pretty funny. I suspect people will not believe me, so here is one of my favorite passages from The Man Without Qualities:

Children are, of course, show-offs, love to play cops and robbers, and are naturally inclined to regard the X family on Y Street as the greatest family in the world if it happens to be their own. So patriotism comes easily to children. But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up.

As the book moves on, essays give way to some very enjoyable fiction: absurd tales, parables, and long narrative jokes. Finally, in “The Blackbird,” the strange, visionary story that ends this collection, Musil discovers how to combine the imaginative and analytical sides of his character. The story is a masterpiece, and the collection is worth owning for it alone.

 

Perhaps no other writer has used fiction more extensively, and with greater intelligence, as a tool for social diagnosis, but Musil also knows precisely where the capacities of intelligence end, and how much of life consists of the irrational and mystical. And unlike the other great works of the last century — Ulysses, say, or In Search of Lost Time — which achieve a greater perfection by sealing themselves off in their own worlds, Musil’s ragged works still speak to us with great urgency, and show a writer’s attempt — failed, finally, but still heroic — to grapple with the accelerating chaos of his times. He is a special writer, and deserves to be kept in circulation. Go find this book, in a store or in the library, along with all of his others, and save them from withdrawal.

 

 

[review for the 1988 Eradonos edition of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author]

 

SINCE so little of Robert Musil’s work is available in English, this collection’s appearance is a major literary event. A congeries of light sketches, composed for Austrian and German newspapers between 1913 and 1929, it was compiled in 1935 when Musil was still living in Austria. But it was first published a year later in Switzerland, the country he fled to in 1938 following the Anschluss. So often ahead of his time, the archivist of social estrangement seems to have anticipated this exile. By 1935 he was both impoverished and horrified by Austrian politics. His audience, never large, had been reduced to a small group, predominantly Jewish and even more endangered than he. Musil’s sense that with the destruction of his public he had “outlived himself” underlines the not quite facetious title, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.

 

Trained as a mathematician, behavioral psychologist and engineer, Musil, who died in 1942, had worked as a journalist, librarian and civil servant before devoting his energies exclusively to literature. With a more academically honed intelligence than any of his peers, he attempted to make of the solitary act of thinking a literary drama. Rather than pursue a Joycean stream of consciousness, he captured the divagation of thought in essays. Indeed, his great novel, The Man Without Qualities, is a perfected instance of essayistic fiction. Each qualification of thought is answered by some astonishing image or incident. The transition between dramatic and discursive realms is a seamless one.

 

The Musilian posture is fraught with contradictions. In the novel, he hails the essay’s capacity to regard “a thing from many sides without comprehending it wholly, for a thing wholly comprehended instantly loses its bulk and becomes a concept.” For Musil, concepts were dogmatic, totalitarian, destructive of every living pattern. He also found them vulgar and humorless, and thus had no time for the Big Idea men, Freud, Heidegger or Jung. On the other hand, Musil said that the essay’s best trait was its reflection of the form “a man’s inner life assumes in a decisive thought” – that is, thought that discovers itself in the process of enunciation. But decisiveness is precisely what you don’t find in his writing. Ulrich, the hero of The Man Without Qualities, possesses so many attributes—professional, national, political, cultural—that they conspire to dissolve him unless he acquires “the passive illusion of spaces unfilled.” This capacity for making yourself a receptacle for experience, rather atypical for a male protagonist, allows him to regard his public lives with baffled amusement: grim, moralistic but never entirely serious. The playfulness —and the transcendence—reside in the freedom from concepts.

 

Musil enjoyed the permutations and combinations produced by the collision of our several roles. But how is “decisive thought” possible amid such chaos? Perhaps not since David Hume has a writer so thoroughly exposed the impossibility of objective thought, and then relied on verbal momentum to steer him out of his cul-de-sac.

 

Yet a theoretical liability frees the essayist’s talent. As he strolls among his several selves, Musil becomes a flaneur of thought. He loiters among impressions as much as objects, regarding them with equal amplitude and precision. Having defined our various traits, he has a particular alertness to popular culture, the kitsch and more-than-kitsch that saturate our lives. After years in Berlin and Vienna, he was too shrewd to condemn the masses’ entertainment. Though exquisitely refined, he was no cultural elitist. Musil’s conceit is that the only alternative to the generalized mess he has revealed is the coherence of his meandering thought. His linguistic facility—the merging of aim, manner and result—is virtuosic. He’s such a consummate stylist that after him Kafka may seem immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious and Walter Benjamin hermetic.

 

In these Posthumous Papers, Musil’s pleasure is to start small. The first essay, “Flypaper,” begins with an almost pedantic description of the sticky substance. It proceeds to focus on trapped insects, briefly comparing them to a woman fighting off a strong man’s grip, and ends with the image of a fly’s moribund twitching, compared to “a minuscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts.” This is the patented Musilian cadence. An immensely sensuous and concrete prose carries us from the ordinary to the almost-surreal and near-apocalyptic, a progression that appears logical, if not methodical.

 

Part wit, part logician, Musil makes us anticipate the invariable rush of qualifications. When he dominates us intellectually, he exhibits a conventionally male sense of authority. But his imagery expresses the “passive sense of unfilled space.” A deeply erotic writer, Musil exhibits an astonishing fellow-feeling with women. They are his sisters, literally so in The Man Without Qualities, in which Ulrich and his half-sibling Agathe perform a kind of spiritual incest. Musilian eros bypasses consummation. In one sketch, “Awakening,” he lies in bed, listening to a woman’s footsteps in the streets; never will he share such intimacy with his lover. In “Clearhearing,” he becomes so absorbed in the sound of each dropped garment postponing their embrace, that he gives up on “anything imaginable.” In another essay, a chambermaid’s smile protects her against the “onslaught of desire.” At such altitudes of feeling, orgasm would be reductive: Musil told his friend Hans Mayer than Ulrich wouldn’t sleep with Agathe because “the characters don’t want it.”

 

Musil’s social diagnoses are equally surprising. In the novel, Ulrich appears to be the one sane citizen of Kakania, a fictive Austria hectically planning an imperial celebration in 1913. The Posthumous Papers indicate that the world war that followed didn’t bring people to their senses. If anything, Musil’s analyses reveal a deepening confusion of past and present that atomizes our already fractured selves. Industry tampers with both nature and art until one ends up preferring prints to paintings, department stores to Vienna woods. Yet nobody is culpable. Our bad taste is prepackaged for we are generated by language. In “The Paintspreader,” words “twist” and shape us, precede our existence and define our responses.

 

But the words are seldom right. Kitsch “strips language of life” even as it turns sentiments, living feelings, into concepts. How does one escape from this maze, still alert and lucid? Artists could help us but, in truth, they merely swoon to higher orders of kitsch. In “Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers,” Musil finds that literary circles thrive all over town, each Vatican with a self-appointed Pope. He prophetically discerns the outcome. Some “genuine paranoiac” will sweep all these amateurs offstage. His will be the latest word, and the last.

 

Nevertheless, this is no lament for a bygone age; excavations or regrets won’t restore these ruins. As for that Viennese specialty, psychoanalysis, Musil considers its sense of emotional history insufficiently inflected, with too many “qualities” missing. He acknowledges Freud’s obsession with domesticity, which turned the haven in a heartless world into the arena of a born-again humanism. But the materialist in Musil demolishes Freudian tenets. In “Threatened Oedipus,” he traces the famous complex to an 1870’s style in skirts. The discarding of folded pleats and their intimation of secret passages, he points out, has simplified the female lap. Today, any lap, even a male one will do, and Orestes nudges Oedipus offstage.

 

By now, some readers will feel immobilized by irony, and in desperate need of an action that is not so stunningly mental. Anticipating them, Musil ends the collection with a group of stories, though most of them are simply new forms of essay in which a dramatized metaphor artfully replaces the more usual mental loitering. “A Man Without Character” provides an entry into the similarly named novel. Its hero is so multifaceted that, when asked to describe his fiancee, he replies, “From the point of view of which character?” He is an athlete gone to seed, although his former, nimble self seems to lurk within the corpulence. In other words, he is Musilian thought rendered visible, his body a palimpsest, character overlaid by the weight of years.

 

The last story, “The Blackbird,” is the book’s longest piece. The narrator, Atwo, is a peripatetic fellow; he even spends some years in the Soviet Union where, typically, he likes the system but hates the litany. On three occasions he hears a blackbird: while deciding to leave his wife; while dodging bullets in wartime; and while reading a children’s book, after the death of his mother. Demonstrating that sentiment is possible, when no longer kitschified into concepts, Musil ends with an extravagance no professional hack would risk. Believing that his dead mother alone preserved a steady image of him—doubtless a false one, but her error constituted his identity—Atwo determines that she is the blackbird. This conclusion is not entirely satirical. It predicts the impulse that led Musil during a particularly miserable exile to develop a form of “religion without God.”

 

Musil was not the first person exile turned quixotic.

 

Granting that he liked to dart between radical and conservative politics—and recognizing that his Jewish wife and largely Jewish public condemned him in the eyes of the Nazis as a religious fellow-traveler—his political pronouncements can be troubling. He was at times intrigued by fascist forms of social control, equivocal about democracy and convinced that the postwar powers would continue the imperial shenanigans of his native “Kakania” (this was not necessarily an error). Our disappointment with his politics is a perverse tribute; an admirer of Musil may want to follow him everywhere.

 

Peter Wortsman’s translation is splendid, succeeding better than any I’ve read in capturing this author’s unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism. Mr. Wortsman finds colloquial equivalents for Viennese slang and makes available a writer whose accessibility may previously have been in doubt.

 

Here’s a working rule of thumb when pondering criticism of Musil: the longer the work, the more divided the opinions. There isn’t much divergence of judgment about Törless or the two plays, for instance, and the exquisite stories in Vereinigungen and Drei Frauen are largely respected if not often really understood. But Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften splits readers into opposing camps; either this colossal novel takes fiction to previously undreamed-of heights of sovereign relativism, relativity, and narrative mastery through non-completability as the final revelation of truth in literary structure, or it fails—though magnificently, despite its brilliant irony—to achieve basic form, to fulfill even the fundamenal requirements of a novel. (Check Doderer on the latter view.)

 

Maybe the reverse is true, too; the shorter the work, the more nearly unanimous the appreciation. Seldom has Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten been esteemed as less than a rarely elegant, rigorously arranged set of reflections and observations, a book of miniatures capturing with utmost success the passion of Musil’s intellectuality and the rigor of his emotions. As his admiring and competent translator, Peter Wortsman, writes in an afterword to this edition, acknowledging Musil’s many branches of expertise, “ [. . .] each sentence is a poetic treatise unto itself, taking aim like a sharp-shooter’s rifle, whirring like a well-oiled engine, fitted with the perfect balance of a theorem [. . .] and keen psychological insight, the whole capped off with the mysticism of a skeptic” (171). First published in 1936 by Humanitas Verlag of Zurich as a kind of concession in his destitute Swiss exile—a concession made by Musil to his own growing awareness that the nature of his undertaking had made it impossible for him ever to finish Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (hence one reason for the wryly valedictory title of the new book)—Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten unites previously published pieces into a small collection arranged with transparency of form and strictness of sequence from the ironic angle of observation the title suggests.

 

Small pieces, more than a few of them “occasional” in the best sense (ephemeral, that is), but nothing here is minor, incidental, or worthy of less than at-tentive, serious contemplation. Musil divided Nachlaß—let’s say Posthumous Papers, though—into four sections: “Pictures,” “Ill-Tempered Observations” (a characteristically sardonic bow to Nietzsche and his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen), “Unstorylike Stories,” and “The Blackbird.”

 

These pieces are treasures, the more precious for their small compass. In the midst of beautifully executed sentences, whose rhythms and cadences Wortsman’s fine ear and delicate sense of style lead him to render with skill, a sudden hilarious or heartbreaking phrase can take on the character of high celebration or deep lament, as when the narrator (Musil “himself”?) of “Can a Horse Laugh?” (14-16) tells of once having seen that phenomenon and adds, “Well, it was before the war; it could be that since then horses no longer laugh” (14). The slow cadence of mostly monosyllables works to slow the breath and tug the heart in sorrow as the elegiac point gently accrues toward the end of the sen-tence. The “Pictures” reward contemplative reading and pondering with new insights–the word meant literally–into ordinary people, places, things, and events. One piece is called “Sheep, As Seen in Another Light” (19-20); but everything Musil touches on is “seen in another light” and as if for the first time.

 

Two of the “Ill-Tempered Observations” appeared in English long ago as “Two ‘Unpleasant Observations’”—Odyssey Review 3, 1 (1963), 213-18, trans. Sigurd Burckhardt—so a comparison with Wortsman’s version is possible here. Wortsman touches Musil’s irony and allusiveness more surely and gently; the echoes of Nietzsche are more clear from the very title on. As for content, the pieces offer satire all the more devastating for being rather quiet, devoid of sarcasm. No writer has ever parodied the sentimentality and cut-rate lyrical pastoralism of Heimatliteratur better than Musil in “Who Made You, Oh Forest Fair . . . ?” (99-105), and the implied skewering of writers like Waggerl or Grogger was an unobtrusively political act in the years of the Ständestaat in Austria or of estab-lished Nazism in Germany. Likewise, “Threatened Oedipus” (106-09) achieves high satire in a few pages, expressing mock-concern that the universal desire to return to the womb might disappear now that women, by not concealing their bodies as they used to, have removed the mystery. No diatribe of Karl Kraus was more effective in demolishing the claims of psychoanalysis, and Wortsman is responsive to every nuance of Musil’s gentle rejection.

 

Short excursus on “What’s a poor translator to do?” The “Unstorylike Stories” aren’t stories at all, according to the original, which calls them “Geschichten, die keine sind.” By definition, translations fall short, and by nature, translators do the best they can. Wortsman’s heading ingeniously avoids the awkwardness that would necessarily result from anything more “literal.” (Try your own version, dear reader, if at all inclined, and you’ll see what I mean.)

 

As for the unstorylike stories themselves, what wonderful stories they are! They display a quiet panache and an unerring sense of narrative development hiding behind their apparenance of not being about anything in particular. Here Musil fulfills the dream of so many writers to achieve an oeuvre sur rien. Each piece is unstorylike in a different way, seeming to violate in turn basic principles of sequence or logic only to grow in the reader’s mind as perfectly organized and articulated wholes. “The Blackbird,” a longer story that constitutes the fourth part, is one of those haunting narrations that lingers and lingers without the reader’s quite know-ing why. It’s a fully valid story in itself, but the appreciation articulated by Wortsman in the afterword (176-77) puts into eloquent words the haunting effect of this justly renowned tale.

 

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is, in brief, the Musil book for those who don’t like or who at least have their doubts about Musil—a state many more readers are in than will admit it. The balanced arrangement of the whole is matched by the form and structure of each individual piece. No wonder this edition is the third printing in as many decades, a book whose return is welcome and for whose reappearance thanks are due to the excellent Archipelago Books. The volume itself is a bibliophilic delight of typography, layout, and cover work, the kind of volume they proverbially don’t make any more.

 

This reviewer had occasion to greet this book in an earlier edition, and his praise is undiminished now. Having gathered considerable experience himself as a translator in the meantime, he can only envy the inventiveness and sensitivity of Wortsman, whose renderings of Peter Altenberg also merit praise. This or that quibble is always possible, if not inevitable, for a reason best articulated by Hilde Spiel, who pointed out that the translator is too close to the work, under too urgent constraint to fashion the new version, to entertain many alternate possibilities, doing which would bring his or her work to a stop. The outsider can always see from a distance, and the temptation to kibitz or to play Monday-morning quarterback is overwhelming.

 

Critics of translation need to remember, too, what Christian Morgenstern pointed out; there are only bad and less bad translations, and the most a translator can hope for is to have his or her version be as little bad as possible. The “something lost” factor is unavoidable, but given that fact, ingenuity in staunching loss becomes a positive virtue, and some translators are legendary for their preservation of nuance and shadings.

 

Any demurrers from this reviewer would be captious and more a matter of prefer-ence than a statement of anything objectionable. I am as allergic to the use of nouns as adjective modifiers (“A Culture Question”; “Art Anniversary”) as I am to the music of Chopin, for example, but I realize it’s me, as they say; in fact, anything that jars me in these translations (using “that” instead of “who” or “whom” as the relative pronoun for persons) is idiosyncratic, and usage through the last six centuries of English proves me captious and wrong here. I also probably need to find a little fault here or there to compensate for my complete admiration. Unlike certain luminaries, Wortsman does not translate thousands of pages a year from German; he is judicious and selective, and the result shows in prose that can be heard as elegant, in rhythms and balances that really reflect the author’s mastery of style. Who could ever hope to capture the short rhythms of the original title in English? (Again, try it before you judge!) That said, Wortsman provides as efficient and literary a solution as can probably be found, and the rest of his endeavor is admirable.

 

The third edition in twenty years makes this little volume a kind of classic in itself, aside from the status of Musil’s original. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author has earned the status it enjoys, and it needs to be greeted (again) with enthusiasm. Writing teachers take note—these pure and flawless pieces ought to be the basis of instruction in fiction classes and essay-writing workshops; this book should be known far beyond the specialist area to which it is sadly likely to be relegated. Colleagues, read it with joy and pass it on to the creative-writing professors and anyone else who can appreciate real writing.

 

 

From Focus on German Studies, University of Cincinnati
review by Anna E. Baker

 

Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author provides an excellent and imminently accessible translation of Musil’s concise and ironic prose. AlthoughPosthumous Papers first appeared in print in 1935, this collection of stories, observations and essays written predominantly between 1920 and 1929 remains a remarkable commentary on post-World War I Germany. The very title proclaims its thesis: the juxtaposition of posthumous and living creates an ironic nexus from which Musil’s concept of “cultural pessimism” stems. The pervading thesis of this collection is as defined by Musil is that “man as a culture-consumer is, in an insidious way, dissatisfied with man as a culture-producer” (79). The ironic title underscores the sense of manufactured consumerism that permeates the entire work as well as a decisive reference to Max Brod’s 1931 posthumous publication and editing of Franz Kafka’s works.

 

Robert Musil is a German-language writer in the truest sense; he was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1880, studied in Berlin and fled the Nazis in 1928 with his Jewish wife to Switzerland where he died in 1942. While some of the essays and stories in this collection stem from the First World War and Musil’s work as a journalist during those years, most were written for various journals and newspapers between 1920 and 1922. Musil’s self-proclaimed “little book” not only reflects the type of audience but the atmosphere in which it was conceived:

To publish nothing but little tales and observations amidst a thundering, groaning world; to speak of incidentals when there are so many vital issues; to vent one’s anger at phenomena that lie far off the beaten track: this may doubtless appear as weakness to some, and I will readily admit that I had all kinds of doubts regarding the decision to publish.

Thus his collection of stories, observations and opinions are a true reflection of the state of German society during the post-war era. Posthumous Papers is divided into four parts entitled “Pictures,” “Ill-tempered Observations,” “Unstorylike Stories,” and “The Blackbird” that depict various aspects of Musil’s theme of cultural pessimism.

 

Like many of his contemporaries, Musil is an author who defies classification. He is neither an Impressionist nor an Expressionist and even the title of Modernist does not precisely describe his writing style: he is more a sum of all of the above. Many critics have labeled Musil a neo-Romantic by comparing his writings to Edgar Allen Poe’s or E.T.A. Hoffmann’s due to the occurrence of fantastical elements in many of his writings. His story “The Blackbird” exemplifies this neo-Romantic inclination in that the main character undergoes a life-changing experience following three visits from a mysterious blackbird; the first causes him to leave his wife, the second occurs as he narrowly avoids death in the form of an aerial dart, and the third causes the character to see the blackbird as a reincarnation of his mother.

 

The stories in “Pictures” present a vivid picture if war-torn Europe and it is here where Musil’s exemplary form of Kurzprose (short prose) is best captured. In “The Mouse,” he described a mountaintop bench which, in his eloquent words, has “been abandoned by” (27) the war only to be damaged by a mouse which digs trenches around it. “Monkey Island” is darkly prophetic with the simians on an Italian island creating a concentration camp with the lesser primates being persecuted mercilessly.  One of the stories in “Unstorylike Stories” functions as a blueprint for his magnum opusDer Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) as it tells how a childhood friend of the narrator attempts to adopt a character.

 

Musil is a master of short prose in that his writings reflect not only his training as both an engineer and journalist, but also the modern post-war and post-Freudian world into which it was conceived. He continues to be compared to the great modern writers of the turn of the century like Kafka, Proust, and Joyce precisely because of prose like that contained in Posthumous Papers. The “Ill-tempered Observations” focus on the rampant cultural consumerism and pessimism Musil finds endemic to modernity. The various observations reflect on the rampant consumerism of post-war Europe by commenting on the purchase of postcards for the sole purpose of conveying personal-exclusivity or the declaration of a beautiful landmark evidence of a manufactured label by a panel of anonymous experts. He even states that the poet had fallen into the abyss of culture consumption and worse, that there are no true poets left anymore.

 

While Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is not nearly as well known as Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confessions of Young Törless) or Der Mann ohne Eigenshaften (The Man Without Qualities), it is an excellent example of Musil’s style and approach to Kurzprose. Peter Wortsman provides an accurate as well as a very accessible translation of Musil from the German into English. Musil may claim that “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” (64), in his essay “Monument;” however, this work reflects the atmosphere of its inception and the cultural pessimism he perceives at the end of World War I. In that sense, his collection of stories and observations is a monument to the period of time between world wars. Thanks to Wortsman’s excellent translation, generations of non-German speakers will be able to access this fascinating literary and cultural contribution as an integral facet of Musil’s writing and an enriching contribution to his presence on the stage of world literature.

 

 

A graceful, moving story of cultures in collision — and concord — in the far north.

Chukchi writer Rytkheu, a native of the Chukotka region of far northeastern Siberia, is well known in Europe but new to American audiences. Influenced by Gogol and other classic Russian writers, he presents a matter-of-fact, sometimes almost ethnographic account of conflict between outside and indigenous cultures, set in early 20th century. The crew of a Canadian vessel, trapped in Arctic ice, set off dynamite in an effort to break the ship free; one unfortunate crewman, John MacLennan, is badly wounded in the attempt. “They should have waited a bit,” remarks a Chukchi who happens on the scene. “A south wind is coming.” The reluctant captain decides to offload the wounded soldier in hope of getting him to a Russian hospital, though John is sure that he’s in for a bad time with “these savages”: “Their faces don’t inspire my trust. These people are just too unsavory-looking. Unwashed and uneducated.” As it happens, Rytkheu’s Chikchi know a thing or two about the healing arts, and soon a shaman is on the job, though John is distressed at losing certain body parts. (“‘What’s he wailing about?’ she inquired of Orvo. ‘Crying over his hands,’ said the old man. ‘Understandable,’ the shaman-woman nodded.”) Recovering, nursing his self-pity, John wonders whether he will ever be able to show himself among his own people again, even as his generous hosts do what they can to make him feel at home. As other outsiders come and go in ever increasing numbers, cultural misunderstanding ensue, while an ever-evolving John, formerly certain that his hosts were cannibals, is now inclined to think, with his Chukchi friend and benefactor Orvo, that “the less we come into contact with the white man’s world, the better.”

Merits a place in the small but rich library devoted to the peoples of Siberia and the Arctic, reminiscent at times of V.K. Arseniev’s Dersu the Trapper and at others of James Houston’s memorable White Dawn.