Works that change how literature is written are few and far between. Georg Büchner’s novel “Lenz,” published posthumously in 1839, is one of them. Though Büchner died, unknown, of typhus at 24 in 1837, the Modernist emphasis on interiority he established runs straight through to Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, Beckett, W.G. Sebald and Elfriede Jelinek. Without Büchner, fiction as we know it would be unthinkable.

Works that change how literature is written should also change the way we read. To this end, Richard Sieburth’s forceful and exacting translation of “Lenz” not only is presented in a beautifully produced bilingual edition, but it also provides the historical material from which Büchner concocted his intense fictional portrait of three weeks of madness suffered by J.M.R. Lenz (1751-92), a playwright and member of Goethe’s circle.

The result is a fresh and unique reading of this classic, one quite akin to what Sieburth describes as Büchner’s own “brilliant (post-) modernist experiment in intertextuality.”

The inspiration for this novel was an account written by Johann Friedrich Oberlin titled “Mr. L…,” which Sieburth includes here. Büchner, in fact, swiped whole passages from it, lifting one-eighth of his story verbatim without any mention of Oberlin. The result does not so much reveal the abuse of Oberlin, the Alsatian minister who tried to care for Lenz, but rather Büchner’s own genius.

For it is what Büchner leaves out—namely, the immediate context that gives rise to Lenz’s madness—that causes the author to supply an interior reality never before seen in a fictional character.

Consider, for instance, Oberlin’s account of Lenz delivering a sermon before Oberlin realizes he is mad: “I went to the altar, said the absolution, and Mr. L. delivered a pretty sermon from the pulpit, although perhaps with too much trepidation.”

Here, on the other hand, is Büchner’s rendering of the same moment: “The pressure within him, the music, the pain, shook him to the core. The universe was an open wound; it caused him deep nameless pain. Another existence now, the quiver of heavenly lips bending down over him and sucking on his; he returned to his lonely room.” Trepidation indeed: The answer to whose “heavenly lips” those are or just what shape that other “existence” takes in Lenz’s wounded mind is never given, only suffered. The power of Büchner’s text stems from the fact that it is told in the third person, but most often from Lenz’s own perspective.

In addition to Sieburth’s inclusion of Oberlin’s original account, the translator contributes an extended passage from Goethe’s autobiography, “Poetry and Truth,” in which the great poet blandly says, “Of all the full- or half-time idlers intent on digging into their inmost depths, Lenz excelled in cultivating and perpetuating this state of conflict, and thus he suffered in general from the tendency of the age to which the depiction of Werther was meant to put a stop &.” When compared with such condescension, the pathos of Lenz’s private suffering is deepened in Büchner’s text.

“One has to love mankind in order to penetrate into the unique existence of each being,” states Lenz, though Büchner makes clear that this is not a task for the weak of heart. Meanwhile, it is Sieburth who has given us “Lenz” in an edition that is a model for how translation can help reveal the complex anatomy of a great work of art.

Peter Filkins is the translator, most recently, of a new edition of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, “Darkness Spoken.”

 

From Translation and Literature
Review by Howard Gaskill, University of Edinburgh

Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion (1797-9) is one of the supreme achievements of the Romantic period in Germany, and, in its combination of linearity and circularity, arguably the most successful exemplification of what Friedrich Schlegel called ‘progressive Universalpoesie.’ For a century or more after its publication it remained virtually the only work for which Hölderlin was known. However, one the major later poetry became accessible, it tended to be eclipsed, dismissed as something of a derivative prentice effort. It is only relatively recenetly, essentially since Lawrence Ryan’s monograph of 1965, that the novel’s narrative sophistication has begun to be appreciated, at least within the German-speaking world, which is of course also best equipped to respond to the stunning quality of the lyrical prose. This quality, it has to be said, has hitherto not been much in evidence in English translations. While Hölderlin’s verse has been well served by translators of the caliber of Michael Hamburger and David Constantine, Anglophone readers of Hyperion have had to make do either with Willard Trask’s translation of 1965 (long since out of print), or more probably with the lightly reworked version of Trask which David Schwartz provided in 1990 for Erich Santner’s edition of Hölderlin’s Hyperion and Selected Poems, which is still available. Schwartz, as we are told by the editor, ‘adapted’ Trask with ‘an eye toward preserving the jarring strangeness of Hölderlin’s diction so that it strikes the American reader precisely as strange rather than merely foreign or archaic.’ In fact Schwartz’s interventions are not always for the best, and when Trask translates feebly, which he does on occasion, his is more often than not left uncorrected. Though perhaps not entirely typical, there are pages displaying multiple errors, everything from basic grammatical blunders and gross misunderstanding of imagery to complete omission of clauses (something not uncommon in other translations of the novel I have consulted, such as French and Italian). When Hyperion comes out of a caravanseray (‘Khan’), Schwartz—though not Trask—has him stepping out of a boat (‘Kahn’). Another example, where Schwartz overlooks a veritable howler, comes in the translation of the following sentence: “Wie die Wooge des Oceans das Gestade seeliger Inseln, so umfluthete mein ruheloses Herz den Frieden des himmlischen Mädchens.” This is rendered: “as the ocean swell about the shores of happy islands, so the peace of the heavenly maiden flowed about my restless heart.” Here, subject and object had been reversed, yielding nonsense—it is of course the restless heart which did the flowing. However, such instances f serious error detract less from Trask/Schwartz than the clumsiness of expression, the rhythmical flatness, and a general failure to do justice to the music of the language. These qualities of the translation must, one imagines, have contributed to the neglect of the novel in the English-speaking world. Hölderlin’s Hyperion is a work of great brilliance and beauty, but the reader solely dependent on Trask/Schwartz may be forgiven for not suspecting this.
Thus the case for a new English translation is a strong one, and in fairness to Ross Benjamin I ought to mention that I am working on one myself. In fairness to Hölderlin it should be said also that he is well served by Benjamin’s new version, certainly much better than by its undistinguished predecessors. Benjamin is of course aware of these, though his does not refer to them directly, and is clearly at pains to de different, sometimes perhaps unnecessarily so.  On the final page of the “Translator’s Postscript” the adolescent Nietzsche’s praise of his favorite poet’s novel is quoted: “In the euphonious movement of its prose, in the sublimity and beauty of the figures that appear in it, it makes an impression on me similar to the beat of waves of the troubled sea. Indeed, this prose is music, soft melting sounds interrupted by painful dissonances, finally expiring in dark, uncanny dirges.” And Benjamin himself concludes his Postscript: “The movement between blissful and sorrowful tones is the novel’s principle of composition and the source of the elemental force of its language. To hear and reproduce Hölderlin’s singular music, is the essential challenge that I have sought to meet in my translation.” It is an entirely appropriate aspiration. For as Hölderlin himself makes clear in his Preface to the novel, the meaning of the work is the whole, and in order to translate that meaning one must at least try to approximate its linguistic beauty, which is not just an incidental bonus, but an integral part of the message. It is a tall order.
Critics have noted the use of hexametric cadences in the prose of Hyperion. However, even if he could, it is debatable whether the translator should attempt close rhythmical imitation. There is also the question of Hölderlin’s Swabianisms. These are perhaps not much in evidence in modern editions with their sanitized spelling, but still show in the frequent use of elisions and contracted forms, many of which will also be rhythmically motivated. Perhas acceptable equivalence here might be achieved by the use of contractions in the translation, something which the English language is able to do better than most, but which both Trask/Schwartz and Benjamin avoid, presumably because they are regarded as colloquial and “un-literary.” Yet I would submit that they do not detract from the music of the language, and could indeed be used to enhance it. And there are other devices whereby prose may draw attention to its own “literariness,” one being alliteration. At the beginning of the seventh letter Hyperion writes:

“Smyrna war mir nun verlaidet. Überhaupt war mein Herz allmählich müder geworden. Zuweilen konnte wohl der Wunsch in mir auffahren, um die Welt zu wandern oder in den ersten besten Kreig zu gehn, oder meinen Adamas aufzusuchen und in seinem Feuer meinen Mismuth auzubrennen, aber dabei bleib es, und mein unbedeutend welkes Leben wollte nimmer sich erfrischen.
Der Sommer war nun bald ze Ende; ich fühlte schon die düstern Regentage und das Pfeifen der Winde und Tosen der Wetterbäche zun voraus, une die Natur, die, wie ein schäumender Springquell, emporgedrumgen war in allen Pflanzen und Bäumen, stand jezt schon da vor meinem verdüsterten Sinne, schwindend und verschlossen und in sich gekehrt, wie ich selber.”

In Benjamin’s version:
“Smyrna was now spoiled for me. On the whole, my heart had gradually grown wearier. At times the wish could arise in me to roam around the world or enter some war, or to seek out my Adamas and burn my discontent away in his fire, but that was as far as it went, and my meaningless, wilted life no longer sought to refresh itself.
Now the summer would soon be at an end; I felt already in anticipation of the gloomy days of rain, and the whistling of the wind, and roaring of the rain-fed streams; and nature which surged up into all the plants and trees like a foaming fountain, now stood already before my darkened senses fading and closed and turned in upon itself, as I was.”
Equally faithful, and arguably closer to the literary quality of the original, might be:
“Smyrna had been soured for me now. My heart had grown altogether weary over time. Now and then the wish might rear in me to wander round the world, or find some war to fight in, or else seek out my Adamas and burn away my rancor in his fire; but wish was all it stayed, and my futile sapless life refused to be refreshed.
Now summer soon was coming to an end; already I could sense the dreich dank days, the whistling of the winds, the brawling of the rain-swollen streams; and nature, which like a foaming fountain had surged in every flower and tree, stood already now before my darkened mind, like me dwindling and closed down and turned in upon itself.”

In his Postscript. Benjamin makes the odd-sounding statement: “Akin to Goethe’s Die Lieden des jungen Werthers…the narrative of Hyperion traces its protagonist’s development from youth to maturity through a series of letters.” In fact, as he well knows, Werther’s letters, written as they are from the perspective of the present, document his decline into madness and suicide. In Hyperion’s case there is an appreciable temporal distance between the writing of the letters and the events recounted. The last of these is the epiphany experienced in the German spring, and it is following this that Hyperion returns to Greece and picks up his pen. It is true that at one point the emotional turmoil caused by the writing itself drives him very close to the brink, but the gradual detachment of the narrator from his former self, as he confronts his past life and comments on it in the process, leads him by the end to a degree of equilibrium, even serenity, and a readiness to embrace his poetic vocation, something which he has in a sense already practically realized. The subtitle of the novel is “The Hermit in Greece,” in itself an indication that it is the narrator’s activity and his development while writing which is central to the novel. Hence the distinction between past and present thought is crucial, and one wonders whether it should not be clearly signaled by use of quotation marks for the former. A leitmotif of the novel is the phrase “So dacht’ ich” (“So I thought”), often following a lengthy record of Hyperion’s thoughts “then” and ever more clearly distancing them from the narrator’s “now”—the final words of the final letter are: “So dacht’ ich. Nächstens mehr” (“more soon”). Benjamin chooses not to follow Trask and Schwartz here, which seems a pity (though they are not, to be sure, entirely consistent). Admittedly, Hölderlin himself does not use quotation marks, even for direct speech, except for the beatific vision at the very end, when it is important for him to distinguish between the Hyperion who initially has the experience and the one who eventually articulates it. Yet the history of the novel’s reception shows how easy it has been to overlook the different narrative levels, and it would seem to me entirely legitimate the provide what help one can for the reader in this respect. (Even the odd translator has had problems determining precisely where direct speech ends and the narrative resumes.)
Intertextuality is likely to represent a severe headache for any translator, and Hölderlin’s novel is clearly not short on literary allusions and intertextual markers, although nowadays many will not be picked up without editorial help, and some not even then. He clearly presupposes a knowledge of Werther on the part of his readers, and in fact some seven per cent of Goethe’s novel is itself translation, from Macpherson’s Ossian.  Hölderlin came to know this work in several German translations, one of which—the prose version by Schiller’s friend Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1782)—he virtually learned by heart. This certainly left its mark on Hyperion, as was evident to Hölderlin’s contemporaries (if not to modern editors). The novel abounds in instances of extended similes which are no less Ossianic that they are Homeric. And at one point Hyperion actually uses what had become a kind of Ossianic catchphrase: “Wonne der Wehmuth.” It is used to Petersen and other German translators to render what Hugh Blair called “one of Ossian’s remarkable expressions, several times repeated: ‘joy of grief.’” No poet who knows his Ossian as well as Hölderlin could possibly use “Wonne der Wehmuth” in innocence of its Ossianic associations, and he would certainly have expected his readers to pick up the allusion.  It might not be going too far to see the novel itself as a sustained celebration of the joy of grief. But to his credit David Schwartz does at least recognize the echo and alter’s Trask’s “ecstacy of grief” accordingly. Benjamin has “joy of melancholy,” which, in context, might seem quite good, though “Wehmut” has softened considerably since the later eighteenth century, the real pain and sorrow, indicated by the “Weh” (woe) in the word, tending to give way to tears without fears.
Be that as it may, a general criticism of Benjamin’s translation would have to be that he is not particularly sensitive to the allusive qualities of the text. Perhaps he should not be blamed for missing Ossian, but Luther’s bible is quite another matter. When Hyperion writes of his heart’s dearest melodies being accompanied by the “Schellenklang der Welt,” this must surely call to mind Corinthians and Paul’s “tinkling cymbal” (“Wenn ich mit Menschen—und mit Englezungen redete und hätte der Liebe night, so wäre ich ein tönend Erz order eine klingende Schelle.”) But Benjamin has “clang of the world’s bells.” The gnomic utterance “Aber schön ist auch die Zeit des Erwachens, wenn man nur zur Unzeit uns nicht wekt” is rendered “But beautiful too is the time of awakening, so long as we are not awakened at an untimely moment.” Yet the “zur Unzeit” is most probably an echo of II Tim. 4.2., and I would suggest that a more satisfactory translation could make use of the King James Bible: “But the time of awakening is beautiful too, if only we’re not woken out of season.”
What could perhaps be said to characterize Benjamin’s translation by comparison with Trask/Schwartz is a certain austerity and self-denial. He does not allow himself much if anything in the way of interpretive intervention, and generally tries to cleave as closely as possible to the source. Much can be learned from him in this respect. He is certainly a careful translator, with an excellent understanding of German (if not always of Hölderlin). In the parts that I have examined closely, I have found no blunders, only the occasional passage where I think the meaning is in some degree misconstrued. An example of this might be when Adamas is addressed as “traurender Halbgott, den ich meyne” and here Benjamin translates this as “mourning demigod whom I recall”—here the verb “meynen” is almost certainly an archaism derived from “minnen,” (love), as in Schenkendorf’s famous song of 1813: “Freiheit, die ich meine;” Schwartz has “of whom I fondly think.” On the other hand, his version displays a certain conservatism in its English usage, and it could be objected that he is unadventurous and shy of taking risks, particularly with regard to syntax. Schwartz’ alleged ambition of preserving the strangeness of Hölderlin’s diction is a sound one, even if he does not realize it effectively. Not is it here a matter of choice between domestication and foreignization. After all, the novel is written in highly rhythmical poetic prose, and poetry will always to a greater or lesser degree involve the estrangement of ordinary language and draw attention to itself as a medium. Benjamin’s language might be considered self-effacing, given that it is mediating the first major work of one of Europe’s greatest lyric poets, ancient or modern. But the translation is there, it is the best we have, and it would be churlish not to acknowledge the achievement.

 

Because of wartime deprivations during the early 1940s, French poet Francis Ponge had only a small notebook to write in. In that notebook, despite the darkness of the German occupation, he wrote loving, playful, smart, and soaring pieces about the smallest inhabitants of the world around him. Ponge wrote like a scientist whose language is poetry. He was endlessly inquisitive about his subjects–including the wasp, birds, the carnation, “The Pleasure of the Pine Woods”–but what we end up learning is how the mind animates the world. In a serious moment in the book, he wrote, “Accept the challenge things offer to language. These carnations, for instance, defy language. I won’t rest till I have drawn together a few words that will compel anyone reading or hearing them to say: this has to do with something like a carnation.” The drive to capture what we all share roots this book that taks on as many modes of seeing as are necessary and available. Ponge describes his subjects from many angles and always with lyricism and a voice, he entered their mindset (even if they did not have one), generated theories on how they function, all the while commenting on his own project and ways of seeing in a friendly manner. As James Merrill wrote, “Ponge forgets no resource of language, natural or unnatural. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention.” The result is a great pleasure to read.

 

Rats—the small rodent kind and the large human kind—figure prominently in Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer. Hordes of rats infest this novel, and they are nearly impossible to exterminate. Georg Letham, the narrator of this sprawling story, is a 40-year-old European physician with self-destructive tendencies and a deep affection for money. Although Letham prides himself on his ability to inspire trust, he is not trustworthy. By the end of the book, the twisted physician rediscovers his humanity and uncovers the epidemiology of yellow fever.

Letham’s life is full of contradictions. He admits to being lucky but gripes about his misfortune. He spends his nights either working in the laboratory or gambling. He is both a criminal and a scientist. Although his main interest is experimental bacteriology, Letham begins a private practice concentrating on surgery and gynecology. In hindsight, his exodus from research is a bad choice. He is not a people person: “Illness interested me, the ill did not.”

Letham’s tragic flaw is carelessness. While investigating scarlet fever, he transmits streptococcal sepsis to 2 surgical patients. He is unfaithful to his older and wealthy wife, and he later murders her by administering a deadly toxin. He is sloppy and leaves evidence—an empty vial and syringe—behind. He goes to trial, and his punishment for poisoning his wife is a life sentence of hard labor in a penal colony.

Meanwhile, yellow fever is wreaking havoc on the tropical island where Letham is sent for imprisonment. The mortality rate from the infection is as high as 55%, and the etiology and transmission of the disease are as yet unknown. Typhus, leprosy, tuberculosis, and malaria also vex the inhabitants of the island. In all, an appropriate environment for a physician-murderer who happens to have an interest in microbiology research. Letham is quickly put to work in a makeshift hospital set up in a former convent. A group of 5 persons including Letham, a fellow convict, 2 physician-scientists, and the prison chaplain (a priest with an “Amen” tattoo) set out to identify the cause of yellow fever and how to stop its spread. They intend to infect themselves with the disease. The men are willing to sacrifice their own lives (along with the lives of others) to find an answer: “Physicians have experimented on human beings from time to time for as long as medical science has existed. It has not been exactly the rule, but by no means the exception, either, that physicians have ventured to experiment on themselves.”

Their self-experimentation is “successful.” Letham contracts yellow fever and endures its terrible symptoms but survives. Others are not so fortunate: 2 men die as a result of the experiment. The scientists prove that the Stegomyia mosquito is the vector of transmission. The governor of the prison island authorizes a program to eradicate the mosquitoes, with the aim of eliminating yellow fever. Letham’s influential father pulls some strings to obtain clemency for his son, and in light of Letham’s sacrifice and service, the murderer receives a pardon. Although he must remain in exile on the island, he is allowed to ply his trade as a physician.

Medical ethics is a hot topic in this novel. Yet the story addresses several important issues beyond the proper behavior of physicians and the moral code of conduct for medical researchers: justice, punishment, altruism, the fear of illness, the joy of recovery, the ecstasy of being alive, and the absolute worth of a single human life. Slowly and painfully, the physician-murderer comes to understand the duty of a physician—which is first and foremost to provide solace for the patient.

The author, Ernst Weiss, has medical credentials. He served as a ship’s physician and as a military physician. He was a friend of Franz Kafka, a survivor of tuberculosis and attempted suicide. First published in German in 1931, the book is now available in an English translation. Although the first half of this marathon-like novel is often tough sledding, it finishes strong. Part medical detective story and part criminal confession, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a long and risky read. From a literary standpoint, readers can expect a sizeable reward for their effort.

His life story itself is the stuff of novels. Born in 1882 to a well-to-do Jewish family in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire—now the Czech Republic—Ernst Weiss spent his youth in some of central Europe’s most agreeable cities: Prague, Brno, Litomerice, and Berlin. He studied medicine in Vienna and later became a surgeon. 1912 saw Weiss take up a berth on a ship bound for India and Japan. When he returned to Europe, the storm clouds were gathering. He served with distinction as a military physician in the Great War: they awarded him the Golden Cross for bravery. Afterwards, he settled in Prague, but he didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.

Before the war, Weiss had struck up a friendship with Franz Kafka, who said of him “what an extraordinary writer he is”. Not everyone agreed: 23 publishers turned down Weiss’ first novel The Galley (1913). He moved to Berlin—where he wrote Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer—but by 1934 things were looking dangerous for central Europe’s Jews, and Weiss fled to Paris. There he lived an impoverished existence, eased by handouts from literary supporters such as Thomas Mann. In 1938, Weiss wrote The Eyewitness, his last novel, which contained a thinly veiled portrait of Hitler; a final act of defiance perhaps, for as the Nazis invaded Paris, Weiss drank poison. He died the following evening.

Astonishingly, it has taken until now for Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer to be translated into English. Joel Rotenberg has done a fine job of rendering Weiss’ snappily sardonic prose. It is presented in a handsome binding by Archipelago books. The eponymous antihero is a bacteriologist who murders his wife. He does so partly for money, partly because she repulses him, but mainly, you can’t help but feel, because he wants to spill blood. Letham is condemned to spend the rest of his life on a far distant penal colony, known only as C, where yellow fever is rampant.

It’s a distinctive and vivid work. Weiss has a remarkable facility for conjuring up chilling scenes of desolation and decay. There’s an eerie account of a doomed expedition to the North Pole that brings to mind Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Here, the sailors are forced to give over their vessel to the insatiable horde of rats that have overrun the ship. “The ship does not understand the rodents in its belly. They merrily go on living. They are not looking for any pole. They are not interested in meteorology, not in dialects, not in Eskimo folktales, not in Christianity. Food to be taken is all that exists for them. If a weaker, good-tasting creature is alive and they can catch it, then they kill it”.

The descriptions of the yellow fever patients are a uniquely piquant mixture of cold medical terminology and visceral human suffering: “the conjunctivae were yellow, shot through with distended scarlet venules. He gave off the foul carrion-like stench that is characteristic of the disease. The tongue and oral mucosa were unspeakably raw, as though the top dermal layers had been removed with a grater, taken down to the bare meat”.

The author questions whether scientific detachment be brought to bear outside the laboratory. “I will hold up a mirror to myself. With a steady hand. With the exacting eye of a scientist” Letham explains in the book’s foreword. In reality, of course, this is a man in thrall to his passions, though he despises himself for it. This novel, it should be noted, was first published in 1931 in a Germany not yet immersed in the terrible collective mania of the Nazi era, against which reason was no match.

There’s more than a hint of Dostoevsky to the book: murderous, itchily neurotic characters, scenes of animal maltreatment and human degradation; indeed, the passages concerning the prisoners’ voyage to C are more brutal and hopeless than anything in Memoirs from the House of the Dead. And like Crime and Punishment, Georg Letham reads in places like a thriller. But there’s none of the Russian’s religiosity: Letham looks to science for his salvation.

Freud’s influence also looms large: there are dream sequences and lengthy passages concerning formative incidents from the protagonist’s childhood. It adds up to a heady journey into the recesses of a tortured soul. But it’s the imagery that stays with you—a remarkable, haunting work. An extraordinary writer indeed.

The words of the criminally insane always bring a unique perspective. “George Letham: Physician and Murderer” is a translation of the chilling German novel that follows George Letham, a physician who is baffled by his own actions as a doctor as he studies himself as he continues his crimes. A truly intriguing and thought provoking read, the character conflicted in his interests of silence and his passion for murder leads to a unique read unlike any other. “George Letham” is expertly translated by Joel Rotenburg, a top grade pick for literary fiction collections.

Eric Chevillard’s Palafox exudes French-ness. From the book’s sleek, elongated shape to its thick pages of modernist/Paris-in-the-1920s/stream-of-consciousness prose, every aspect of this novel is evidence of its having been written in the land of baguette and beret. What other country, after all, could produce a text centered around an indefinable animal — one who, during the course of its 136 pages, changes from a chick to an insect to a jellyfish to a rhinoceros to a whale — without its human characters ever expressing confusion? Only in France, home of the Theatre of the Absurd, could an author pull off such a feat.

Chevillard’s novel is a sort of animalian version of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s great “biography” of a character who changes gender, personality, class, and profession many times during the course of the work. Like Woolf’s protagonist, Palafox is pathologically chameleonic. It begins its life as an adorable creature, pecking its way out of a delicate egg at a dinner party and charming its owner and his guests in the process; forty pages later, it escapes its pen and goes on a killing spree, eating every animal it encounters. The creature alternately spends time in a circus pen and sails into the oceanic horizon with a woman on its back, wins dog shows and decapitates terriers, is loved by its owners and slits the throat of one of their parakeets. This is an animal that furiously resists categorization.

And yet, the novel’s one constant is the four scientists who follow Palafox around, a team of bumbling men busily attempting to classify the creature. Each of the four have completely different understandings of the animal, depending upon their academic backgrounds, and each is unable to see Palafox for the enigma it is. The message — that science regularly misses the point, and often studies things according to the way scientists understand the world rather than the way the world really is — is well-taken, if a bit heavy-handed, but such is often the nature of the messages in this type of concept-book.

First published in France in 1990, Chevillard’s third novel wasn’t translated into English until late 2004, when Wyatt Mason made what I’m sure was a Herculean effort to render the novel’s fluid, complex, and subtle stylings into English. Mason’s translation is stunning — the book’s prose is simultaneously smooth and startling; its long, comma-filled sentences dart in different directions but somehow manage to maintain an internal logic that, incredibly and crucially, keeps this rambling absurdity of a text together. All of this combines to make Palafox a lot like the modernist novels I read in college — formally experimental, beautifully written, aggressively toying with the line between real and surreal — and it does these things surprisingly well. If my knowledge of absurdist plays extended beyond the Beckett-inspired Waiting for Guffman, I would compare Chevillard’s novel to those too, and, if I agreed with the majority of the French press, that comparison would be favorable. To my knowledge, not many writers are still writing this way — keeping alive the delightfully bizarre style made popular in early twentieth century avant-garde Parisian literary salons. That Chevillard does this, and does it interestingly, makes this novel a curious and pleasantly anachronistic read.

Wyatt Mason’s translation of Eric Chevillard’s third novel Palafox elegantly captures the style of whimsy of the French original. Sentences caper musically to intricate patterns of wordplay and shifting, characterized narration from the first hatching of the title creature Palafox. With the aid of four scientists, Palafox’s adoptive family attempts to keep the creature as pet and performing attraction. While the scientists fail to define him or predict his behavioral patterns, Palafox shifts between forms, ambiguously positioned between bird and fish, insect and mammal. He exists not as an embodied whole but in the shifting minutiae of his parts. Chevillard carefully catalogs the pieces of Palafox’s composition even as they contradict each other, for a fragmented, cubist vision that leaves the reader never fully able to envision the creature—instead he’s held together as a series of visceral fragments. Meanwhile each chapter turns on the meticulous description of process: either the scientific methods of the four experts, of that of Palafox’s daily life—his upkeep, his escapades, his environmental preferences, all dealt with in scenes of increasing absurdity. As the family becomes increasingly frustrated with Palafox’s ambiguity, their reactions become hostile, culminating in a stunning Palafox recipe section. Though Chevillard’s writing is often compared to Samuel Beckett, in Palafox it is more reminiscent of Julio Cort·zar’s absurd processes in Cronopios and Famas or Borges’s magical bestiary in The Book of Imaginary Beings. Indefinable and untamable, Palafox is an impossible pet even when on his best behavior; he remains a wild beast—wildest perhaps in his blurriness and uncertainty.

 

Palafox is Eric Chevillard’s third book to be translated into English; the other two, The Crab Nebula and On the Ceiling, were respectively about a semi-mythical figure named Crab whose personality and physical features were insistently nebulous, and about a man who wears a chair upside down on his head. The flux and absurdity of both those books is manifest in Palafox as well.

The titular figure of this novel is a strange creature that pops out of an egg at the breakfast table and then is adopted as a pet before being subjected to scientific scrutiny. Remarkably fluid in physical appearance, Palafox seems at time to have a break, at other times to be closer to an octopus, sometimes big enough to be capable of killing livestock, sometimes small enough to eat out a beet from within. He has tusks, has scales, has whiskers, weaves webs, has little pink hands, has no limbs at all, has feathers, etc. A cadre of scientists brought in to examine Palafox end up only sowing even greater confusion as to his nature.

By this proliferation of often contradicting details, Chevillard lampoons science and epistemology and creates a sense of a creature that is both very vivid and completely ungraspable, offering the reader an experience that is as disturbing and absurdly funny as it is sublime. Indeed, the current American new fabulism could learn a great deal from this very amusing book and its willingness to take real narrative risks all the more impressive considering that it was first published in France almost 15 years ago. Beautifully translated by Wyatt Mason (who has also translated Rimbaud and Pierre Michon), Palafox is a must for anyone interested in anti-realist fiction.

 

Born in 1881 in a mountain village in the Apennines not far from the marble quarries of Carrara, Enrico Pea was just the kind of Odyssean literatus bound to appeal to Ezra Pound. After kicking around the province of Lucca in his youth, as a mechanic, farmer, marble-cutter, and dockworker, Pea set off for Alexandria, where he frequented anarchist circles, befriended the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, and became a relatively successful importer of Italian marble and a furniture maker (Pound, himself a carpenter ý ses heures, would later write of his prose: He “writes like a man who could make a good piece of mahogany furniture”). Upon his return to Italy in 1914, Pea settled in the resort town of Viareggio on the Tuscan coast where, under the patronage of local celebrity Giacomo Puccini and working with such younger writers as Eugenio Montale, he organized outdoor arts festivals intended to bring theater and opera to the populo. Pea’s activities as a cultural impresario (which paralleled Pound’s in Rapallo, some thirty miles up the coast) were cut short in the early ‘40s. Suspected of anti-fascist tendencies, he retreated once again to the Lucca and remained there until he died in 1958.

In Italy, Pea’s reputation as a writer rests largely on his autobiographical trilogy of novels from the ‘20s—Moscardino, Il Volta Santo, and Il Servitore del Diavolo—which are often compared to the works of Sienese author Federigo Tozzi, owing to their intensely regionalist focus on rural life and rich deployment of local dialect. Both authors’ work was a refashioning of the tradition of Giovanni Verga, whose earthy Sicilian verismo D.H. Lawrence first “Englished” in the ‘20s. Pea’s Moscardino, published in modernism’s annus mirabilis of 1922, is a far more daringly experimental work. Upon first reading this “strange and wondrous book,” Italo Svevo confessed envy of the sheer “power and evidence” of its language. When Pound belatedly discovered the book in 1941, it came as something of a revelation: Here was the Wessex of Thomas Hardy hallucinated into a dreamscape whose fragmented cadences recalled the prose of Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, or CÈline. At his microphone on Radio Rome, the American poet excitedly informed his listeners: “This is just announcin’ that Italy has a writer, and it some time since I told anybody that ANY country on earth had a writer.”

Despite his nomadic, expatriate existence, Pound remained drawn throughout his career to the poetics of place. In his Pisan Cantos (perhaps his greatest celebration of the locus amoenus, written only a few miles south of Pea’s Viareggio), he mentions Pea in the same breath as James Whitcombe Riley, the American dialect poet and a lifelong friend of Pounds, as was Joel Chandler Harris. A similar nostalgia for the local informs his early praise for the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost, and it extends into his admiration for Mussolini’s program of autarchia, designed (in theory, at least) to empower regional self-rule, a vestige of Il Duce’s (and Pea’s) anarcho-syndicalist beginnings.

Regionalism, Gramsci once quipped, is merely the pastoralization of class conflict. Although rooted in the local landscape and idiom of Pea’s native Versilia, Moscardino is definitely a version of anti-pastoral—which is to say, it belongs to that same genre of modernist satire to which Pound assigned both Joyce and Lewis. Loosely framed as a Faulknerian chronicle of the decline of a noble family into penury and disarray, Pea’s autobiographical novel casts a sharp and vitriolic anticlerical eye on the disintegration of Italian rural life at the turn of the century, as the traditional hierarchies of class and gender were giving way to a kind of generalized delirium. Fittingly, the central figure in the tale is the young protagonist’s mad grandfather, who between bouts in the local insane asylum (or “gook house,” in Pound’s idiolect) runs a household consisting of his mute mother, his two neurasthenic brothers (one of whom ends up hanging himself), and a servant girl from the mountains whom the grandfather has raped and impregnated. A blend of D’Annunzio’s fin de siËcle gothic and Verga’s primal screams, this family tragedy (or is it black comedy?) sometimes sounds eerily like Flannery O’Connor in Pound’s English version — although utterly without O’Connor’s gonzo Catholic vision of redemption.

Pound’s translations are among his most autobiographical works. Undertaken in 1941 when he was increasingly losing his grip (as evidenced all too dramatically by the logorrhea of his wartime radio broadcasts), Pound’s English rendering of Moscardino, particularly in those passages in which the lunatic grandfather reminisces, prepared the way for the great theatre of memory he would enact in the Pisan Cantos four years later. At the same time, the project served to reengage those fertile regions of madness and delirium in Pound’s imagination that, from his early Piere Vidal poems through his versions of Sophocles at St. Elizabeths, remain one of the deepest wellsprings of his work. “When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant’s forefoot shall save you,” Pound observed in one of the Pisans. At times, when the phantasmagoria of Pea’s prose momentarily lifts in order to reveal almost CÈzanne-like notations of local landscape, we hear the old miglior fabbro turning out sentences as splendid as any in Joyce: “Gulls at rest on the sea-water, in little groups, crowds of them further off, others scattered over a sea fanned by a cool northwest wind. Patternless as a field of daisies sprouting in an unbounded meadow. A sea paler than spring grass feathered by so gentle a breeze, petals, blown off, deflowered.” Or (shades of Hardy or Burns?): “Now it is winter and the hummock is green and the rosebush is a bundle of thorns.”

Out of print for fifty years, Moscardino remains the most overlooked item in the Pound canon. This handsome little volume contains a new introduction by the poet’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, as well as Pea’s own brief memoir of his encounters with his unexpected American double—the other E.P.