"Agathe: Or the Forgotten Sister": A Sort of Review

 

 The publication of a translation, hawked as a new volume of The Man without Qualities in English, but which turns out to be, rather, a small selection from almost exclusively already-translated material, raises interesting questions about the uses and abuses of re-translation and of the publishing industry. Every translator who re-translates something which has already been translated (as I myself just dared to do with Unions), must endeavor to justify his or her task, and justify its purchase to any would-be book buyer, and this interest on the part of translator and publisher may, in some cases, lead to special pleading and special misleading.

     Agathe: or the Forgotten Sister, published by The New York Review of Books and translated by Joel Agee, while guilty of both kinds of pleading and misleading, nevertheless may offer something valuable to the small world of Musil translations in English. Agee's introduction to the volume is both sensitive and erudite, revealing a deep and vast reading and understanding of Musil. The focus on the Agathe material, furthermore, is a great relief (to me at least) from the frequent critical discussions of the novel, which tend to focus primarily on the earlier ironic socio-critical chapters involving the so-called "parallel campaign". This frequent myopic focus on the earlier chapters, seen recently in reviews of Menasse's novel The Capital, leaves much to be desired. While they are brilliant in their own right and quite useful nowadays for summing up global and national political problems, a focus on only these earlier chapters threatens to reduce the vast, philosophical, experimental, mystical novel to a witty social satire. Agee, like myself, was drawn to Musil's exploration of "the other condition," a mystical state of aesthetic-ethical timelessness; and the so-called "Agathe chapters" he has chosen to translate are rife with material related to this concept. Thus, I welcome any new translation that might draw the critical attention more deeply into what to me are some of the more interesting parts of the book. And what more seductive allure than Agathe, one of the most attractive fictional women of all time, comparable only to Rosalind of Shakespeare's "As You Like It"? Both women are witty, androgynous, daring, and passionate. Agathe has the added charms of being criminal, elegantly modern, existentially despairing, and Ulrich's sister. She is thus taboo; thus all the more attractive. 

      The material, then, included in this volume, is extremely engaging. Some of the most fascinating writing ever. Nothing to complain about there.

     The translation itself, though certainly not better than that of either Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike's (whose 1995 Knopf edition is my gold standard of reference), seems mostly good. One can always find moments to quibble at (and I have found some odd and unjustified constructions or renderings on Agee's part), but I have also found some felicitous new turns of phrase or word choices, to be sure. On the whole, I feel (and "feel" is the operative word, since it is very difficult at this micro-level of small variations to establish what it is that makes one version better than the other) that Sophie Wilkins' and Pike's renderings are more elegant, crisper; they seem to capture Musil's tempo and particular lucidity of mind more. Or maybe I am just used to them. 

     Agee writes in his introduction that he read aloud passages of his translation to his wife; which is interesting, since Burton Pike has said that he struggled with his part of the translation until he discovered that Musil read aloud passages in progress to his wife, Martha. Pike then took to reading the German and English aloud, focusing on the all-important tempo of Musil's prose. Thus both translators used that similar method. Agee also eloquently expressed a translation theory, which I myself wrote of in my introduction to the collection of my translation of Musil's small prose, Thought Flights. Agee writes that "Musil hardly ever employs a common turn of phrase...it is a temptation for a translator to navigate strangeness in the original with something more familiar. In my view, this temptation must be resisted". In my words: "The writing and thought are devoid of cliches, and a translator must ever labor to resist choosing conventional phrases for original words and their syntheses...". The challenge in this methodology, of course, is in choosing words and phrases that, while unconventional, are not also clunky or "off" in ways that are not commensurate with Musil's carefully-tuned melody. There are times when Agee does not succeed; but translation is, as we know, almost impossible. And all of us are merely approximating. 

     The only real problem with this translation is whether or not it was needed, that it takes the material out of context, and that it has been presented as something a bit different than it is. Agee himself does not even suggest that there was anything wanting in the previous two translations (Wilkins-Kaiser or Wilkins-Pike), even very properly and nobly acknowledging that these former translations gave him an advantage in his own work, and explicitly noting in the text places where he adopted the solutions of the previous translators because he deemed, in those cases, that they could not be improved. Either he was being politic, or he did not find any problems in the previous translations that warranted the new work in question. Nor has he explicated a new or alternate perspective on how the text might be better rendered into English. Why then a new translation?

     While it is not fully explained in the introductions of either the translator or editor, I was reminded by Walter Fanta, who presides over the Musil archive and Musil scholarship from Klagenfurt, that the project was conceived by a millionaire philanthropist, Nicholas Berwin, in collaboration with artist, Paul Ryan, who had created a rather lovely, eclectic artist's book that was exhibited at the Musil Museum. I had been contacted, years ago, through Fanta, possibly to be a translator or advisor for the texts of this very book! But I splashed cold water on the project, and was rightfully passed over for someone more enthusiastic. What happened to the artist's book and Paul Ryan? 

    Although Agee may not be, Berwin, a retired investment banker, who by his own admission, was unsure of his German, was very critical of the Wilkins-Pike translations, deeming them unnecessarily difficult and off-putting. Berwin also suggested that someone like Eckhart Tolle (the popular spiritualist guru) would be the right sort of person to write something about the mystical aspects of the novel. This judgment can be taken together with his advocacy of  the need for a complete new translation of the novel! Agee thanks Berwin's charitable trust in his acknowledgments for a "generous grant". There I went again, letting my principles get in the way of maybe getting paid for my work! I have a constitutional suspicion of excerpts; I must admit, as I did to Berwn at the time, that I am a sort of purist. The kind of person who doesn't mind brother-sister incest as a theme in a novel, but who cannot condone people writing sequels or finishing deceased authors' works, or of presenting an excerpt as if it were a novel, more or less complete in itself. 

     I also (full disclosure) learned everything I know about Musil and about translation from Burton Pike. I cannot imagine his translation being surpassed by any new one, and did not appreciate Berwin's intention to turn Musil's extremely challenging, experimental novel into an easy-to-read best seller. I am not suggesting at all that Agee's translation travesties the novel, its style, or its content in this way. But the publication as an excerpt out of context does, I believe, effectively deflate the dynamic aesthetic effect of the whole (in so far as an unfinished novel can be conceived of as whole). Musil's build up, through cynicism, cold irony, alienation, humor, and wit, lays the ground work that allows for the shock and dramatic contrast between the earlier parts of the book and the so-called Agathe sequence. Ulrich's hyper intelligence, his mathematical-logical mind, are the necessary foundation for allowing the mystical mood that pervades the later passages. Ulrich's relationships with other people in the novel, his philosophical musings about reality, action, perception, and possibility, the historical pre-WWI setting, all are necessary context for what will come next.  That being said, again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the material, per se, or with Agee's  translation. The problem is in presentation, marketing, and in everything that is left out. The backstory of Berwin's big plans for a retranslated, populist Musil tells us something about the premises of the publication; something the introduction leaves out. And also lends a special coloring to the special pleadings and misleadings mentioned above and explicated in what follows.

     Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB Classics, may have been misled himself (by Berwin?), but his suggestion, in the tantalizing last line of his introduction, that this volume fulfills George Steiner's vision of a publication of Musil's posthumous draft chapters is odd, to say the least.  The bulk of this book is, in fact, made up of material from Part III of the novel, published in 1933 during Musil's lifetime. Not the Posthumous Papers at all. This book's chapters 23 to 30 are selections from the so-called "Druckfahnen" (galley-proof) chapters, withdrawn from publication by Musil, but included in both English translations of the novel, and the last five selections alone are revisions Musil was working on up to his death. Yes, these twelve chapters are, strictly, part of the Posthumous Papers, but only a very small selection of them. By contrast, Pike's translation of the "Posthumous Papers" includes over 600 pages of this material; the 1978 German version includes over a thousand pages; and there is more, included in the Klagenfurt Edition (previously an on-line database and soon to be online).  

    This thin volume that is supposed to fulfill Steiner's vision of a separate edition of the Posthumous Papers, includes only about 100 pages. Furthermore, the two supposedly new translations included in this volume are actually only different versions of chapters chosen by Pike. In rereading the correspondence between Berwin, Fanta, and the artist, Paul Ryan,  I see now that there was some discussion about these "new," differing versions, which Berwin had insisted were far better than the ones that Burton Pike, the brilliant, erudite, and extremely nuanced international Musil scholar and translator, who had introduced the English speaking world to Robert Musil, had chosen to include. Why, I cannot fathom; nor did Berwin or Agee explain in what way they were better. In any case, while those Musil fanatics who do not know German can be thankful for two short new translations out of the many variants in the Posthumous Papers, none of this looks very much like a fulfillment of Steiner's vision of a volume that would reveal the genius of Musil's great later writing. If we were to look around for a volume that best fit that description, it would be Pike's translation.

      It remains to be said in this regard, that not only do the selections included in this "Agathe" volume exclude hundreds of pages of delicious, brilliant non-Agathe writing, but they also exclude hundreds of pages of fabulous, incomparable, significant material that is strictly related to Agathe, including the all-important scenes that are available in Pike's version, describing Ulrich and Agathe's journey (for those interested in whether or not the siblings do or do not cross the line into incest: they do in these chapters), and some of my other favorites, "Attempts to Love a Scoundrel," "Special Mission of a Garden Fence," "The Three Sisters," alternate versions of the supreme "Breaths of a Summer's Day," and many others. While even the 1000 + pages in the 1978 German version and the 600+ pages of Pike's Knopf version exclude much fascinating material, and while each edition has made differing (and controversial in the case of the German edition) editorial decisions about the arrangement of the material, when it comes to the Posthumous Papers, this "new" volume, alas, offers relatively slim pickings.

     To be honest, none of this  put me in a mood very favorably disposed to give the translation a very fair reading. Mr. Agee, a fine translator and deep reader of Musil, is not to blame for this, nor, perhaps, is Edwin Frank of the NYRB, who may not have known about the real lay of the land in this complicated publication history; but I am troubled by this book. It seems to represent precisely the sort of use and abuse of culture, a trend toward sensationalist popularization, that Musil himself fought violently against. If he had wanted to be what he ridiculed as a "Grossschriftsteller" ("big-shot writer"), he could have foregone all the hardships of decades of arduous work and swiftly thrown together some potboilers. He emphatically resisted a sort of writing life he deplored as anathema to his idea of art's role as cultural, ethical-aesthetic impetus. Musil should be much more popular than he is with English-reading audiences.  But if making this happen means leveling him down rather than raising the discourse level, I doubt he would be well pleased. If, on the other hand, this volume were to lead more people to read the beautifully, crystal-clear, brilliant and fascinating larger 2-volume Knopf edition, to read the plucked out chapters in their dynamic context within the whole unfinished masterpiece; if this volume were to lead readers to discover the other astonishing women in The Man without Qualities: Clarisse, Diotima, Bonadea, Rachel, Gerta; if this volume brought more people to a discovery of the rich, complex, experimentally daring, aesthetically astonishing, thought-provoking, challenging work of Robert Musil, it might be excused for tampering with a masterpiece.

    After the publication of Part II of The Man without Qualities, Musil wrote,"A success of this novel would contradict the picture of the times that the novel, itself, presents. The absence of success would, perhaps, call the author's powers of persuasion into question, but at the same time, attest to the novel's conception. What should I hope for? Naturally, I wish for the response that you anticipate. But I don't believe in it. Later, perhaps much later".

     The question thus remains: does this new publication suggest that Musil's time has finally come? Or does it suggest the opposite, that we are just as far away (or even further) from such a time as ever? 

Conversations with Burton Pike

Tomi Ungerer, Moon Man

On Friday I had the pleasure of visiting my Doktorvater, Burton Pike, in his little New York City apartment, in a tall tower-like building surrounded on all sides with the new New York of boutiques and bars and young, eager, rich people zipping about their perennial busy business. Earlier, I had stopped in at McNally-Jackson on Prince Street, to see what the hipsters were reading. The New York Times had just printed an article in the style section about the bookstore owner, Sarah McNally, and how she spent her Sundays. Apparently, she is reading Musil's "super old book, The Man without Qualities," and the Times printed a quote from the novel about rushing about--the modern condition. At the bookshop, I bought Burton a copy of Carl Seelig's wonderful book, Walks with Walser (trans. by Anne Posten), which documents Seelig's visits to Walser in the mental hospital, and the hikes they took together, stopping at little Swiss inns and restaurants for exquisite little feasts, well lubricated with lovely cold wines and refreshing spirits, peppered with Walser's bon mots and reminiscences. A lost world, but one still accessible in words, paradoxically available in a shop that is the very epitome in some ways of the new world that seems to cancel out the old one. Walser told Seelig things, things that no author today would dare to say.

Burton was telling me things too, and I should have been taking notes as he reminisced about his life, including stories about his long-time friend, Tomi Ungerer (who had been cancelled back in the 60's, for the unpardonable sin of being both a children's book illustrator/writer and someone who drew erotic or pornographic drawings). Burton had Ungerer's books and pictures in piles along two sides of the living room, about to be sent to an archive at an American university. They had met in Switzerland, when Burton was on a Fulbright, I think. And Burton was enchanted with Ungerer's wild spirit. There was much drinking and, I gather, wandering about late at night along ancient streets. Over the years, he would watch Tomi draw, images seemingly appearing out of nowhere...a line of ink becoming a building, a person, a situation, and he would ask Tomi how he created what he did, but Tomi was unable to tell him. The creation, an enormously prolific generation of images, seemed a miracle. Astonishing.

He told me of his time teaching American literature in Germany, including putting on a Gertrude Stein play with the students. He had a little office and the students would come knock on the door. Like all the other professors, he would say, "Herein" (come in), and they would come and sit down, but say nothing. Eventually, he asked one of them why they came, if they had nothing to ask. This student told him that all the other (German) professors would also say "herein," but that once they came in, the professors would send them away, telling them that they had no time. Apparently, they just wanted to experience the novel sensation of being welcomed by a professor.

He mused about how we end up being what we are and doing what we do, saying that with him the big life choices seemed to come mostly by chance. In high school, the music teacher had called to him in the hall way, "You're tall; do you like music? Do you want to play the double bass?" And he did like music, so he did. This led to some of the most joyous experiences of his life, including playing in a jazz trio and singing in the midst of a choir of voices in Switzerland, singing the Saint Matthew's Passion, a wonderful experience he likened to being a thread in a carpet.

And why, and how did he come to be fluent in German and French. Another mystery. But perhaps related to his love of music, his innate sensitivity to rhythms and cadences, melodies and tones, something that has meant a great deal for his translation work. When translating the Nachlass to The Man without Qualities, he has said that he was stuck until he discovered that Musil read his drafts aloud to Martha. Then he began to read the words aloud, discovering the key to how to translate them. It was all about the sound. Perhaps this is also why he always remembered what a German professor had told him about Thomas Mann, when Burton admitted to be working on him: "Er hat," the professor declared, "kein Melos" (He has no melody). Musil certainly does.

We talked about Musil's sentences and decided that they had a particular remarkable pattern. While Kafka's sentences begin saying one thing and often end up contradicting what their beginning states, Musil's sentence begin with something familiar and then proceed onto something deeper. They complexify along the way. And in so doing, they teach us how to think. We even attempted a sort of musical version: la la la da la da/da la da la da da/ PLUMP. An approximation of how he sort of leads one along lightly and calmly, and then sort of drops a small bomb towards the end, to wake us up.

We talked of contemporary fiction, which he found mostly shallow and uninteresting compared to the depths and infinite unfathomableness of Musil and Proust. He also spoke quite a bit about Woolf's To the Lighthouse, as a remarkable example of how a work has its own life and parameters.Once a work has come into a certain form, it sort of crystallizes there and the poor artist cannot alter it any further. The only choice at that point is to start another work. The great books are great, he suggested, largely because of their perfectly idiosyncratic forms--forms related intrinsically to their authors' idiosyncratic natures. The strangeness of the beginning of In Search of Lost Time, the impossible unending form of Musil's Man without Qualities, the oddity of Kafka's Castle. And it should go without saying, that we are not talking about some sort of forced attempt to be new or avant garde, but rather of a true impression taken of the very particular personal individual strangeness of the authors, a faithful impression, unadulterated by some preconceived idea of what a novel should or should not be.

We praised Iris Murdoch and Natalia Ginzburg and Clarice Lispector, all writers who emphatically saw and wrote in their own idiom. We talked about how Steiner, whose After Babel Burton had encouraged me to read in graduate school, asserted that all language use is a form of translation. A translation of one person's idiolect into something others could approximately understand.

I mentioned that there had been a twitter "thread" asking translators what they love most about translation, and, for his answer, he quoted the e.e. cummings poem, ending in:

there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

And I suppose that sentiment, an American version of the old Baudelairean, "anywhere, anywhere, out of this world," uttered in a room high up above the madding crowd of contemporary New York, as if inside an eternal timeless-spaceless mind, explains a great deal about our love of literature.

Crystalizations of Musil's Unions in the garden of Unnameable Books

It was a wild weekend for me, traveling down from rural Vermont to my old stomping grounds in the New York City area for my father's 80th birthday party on the Upper West Side and for the book launch at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn. On the train down, the two events mingled in my mind as I attempted to prepare something to say for both occasions. In typical Musilian fashion, they seemed gradually to be very related.  Thinking about my father, who seems to eternally refresh and renew himself, who is exceptionally vibrant and open to newness, and about Musil's resistance to closure, his insistence on the "motivated life," and his constant work to reinvigorate language by new seeing, new arrangements, new combinations of words into fresh metaphor, and his "Utopia of the next step," whereby no act may be judged except by what next act it engenders, it all seemed to be about the same thing.
    I ended up writing a speech for my father's party about the universal struggle to become one's self, to find one's voice, to untie one's hands from whatever social and familial conditionings constrain us. It was a beautiful party, but very drunken and went late, including the after-party dancing party and after-dance party present opening, and the drive back to my mother's house in Hastings, where my nephew and I were staying the night. By the next day, waking up in my childhood room (eternal recurrence! The selfsame -seinesgleichen- recurs!), I was foggy-headed, exhausted...well, hung over. And I feared I could not find any of the words or associations necessary to speak clearly or to illuminate even a small sense of what I wanted to impart about Musil that evening at the reading. I wanted it to be meaningful for the Musil-scholars and for the people who were just there to see me, some who were artists and writers, others not, but I could hardly retrieve the most common words in my stupor.
   My sister's lovely new boyfriend drove us all down (mom, my sister, my nephew) through harrowing traffic, and they left me to "clear my head". After drinking a gigantic juice with lots of ginger and mint and a double espresso, I betook myself to the lovely bookshop and its lovely garden and sat, slumped over in a chair, trying to remember something. As I was looking through the first pages of the first story, I suddenly thought I understood something I had not understood before. Crystalization! I said, aloud, and scribbled it down. Not that I had not noticed it before. In fact, we had taken out a footnote about how Musil had probably gotten the image and idea of crystallization from Stendhal's On Love, but in the nature of things, when one is tired and the synapses are loose, one can sometimes slip into a sort of mystical state (an Other Condition, in Musil's parlance), wherein things considered in more sober moods come to suddenly seem earthshaking. I realized that the whole first story, and probably the second too, was an illustration of the oscillations between crystalizations of significance, meaning, forms (with their sharply focused facets) and the dissolution of these temporary arrangements, followed by the planes shifting then into new arrangements or shimmering significance, belief, beauty. Then I "realized" that both the stories in the collection featured second-by-second descriptions of the process by which one may enter the Other Condition, something that I think is not provided anywhere else in Musil. He describes what it is like to be there, and certainly provides many moments of lucid seeing that can only have been culled in such states, but only in these stories  does he explicitly show how one might arrive there.
    Quite graphically, in "The Completion of Love," we see the crystal facets of the husband and wife in their enclosed living room, protected by the green blinds (like closed, and then semi-opened eyelids, a precursor of the garden which surrounds Ulrich and Agathe in the great novel), and then we experience, through Claudine's train journey away from her husband, the dislodgement and then the dissolution of the fixed forms of her married life....and then, later, the new city where she is visiting her daughter, becomes a new enclosed crystal, snowed-in, surrounded by a perimeter that cannot be bridged.  Astonishing.
    The people in "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" are also separated from the world, enclosed within their house and garden.  Within this microcosm, certain things seem possible that would seem absurd or certainly socially unacceptable, though the opinions of the world do sometimes seep in, and prevail, and prevent actions. Only by getting away from this odd microcosm does Johannes manage to see that he must not kill himself. Though Veronica remains, her world is dramatically changed by Johannes's leaving. She is able to focus even more intensely on her self, her memories, her sensuality, and this focus initiates another Other Condition within a general everyday other sort of condition (since Veronica always lives in an other sort of condition from normalcy). But she breaks out of her normal otherness, to experience a new state of being. And I "realized," while choosing the passages from this story to read for the book launch, and then thinking about them later, that Veronica is an ecstatic. A visionary. While one may mistake her for a sick, confused victim of her childhood experience, this experience is part of what gives her the ability to see the way she sees. And this seeing is an ecstatic, joyous, extra-sensory kind of seeing. She is like one of those medieval visionaries who sees and describes her visions from out of some sickness, some self-starvation, some weakness. The weakness, as is suggested about Johannes a few times, is actually a strength. Her illness, her madness, is a portal to higher seeing. While I realized that her name came from Saint Veronica, whose cloth held the impression of Jesus's face after she wiped away his sweat, I had not really grasped until now, why Musil related her to that Veronica. And then, in an even more confused state, while falling asleep the night after the reading, I wondered if maybe Musil intended for one to imagine that the cloth held an impression, not of Jesus's face, not, then of Johannes's or Musil's own, but of Veronica herself. The female saint alone without her male priestly guardians and spiritual guides, undresses amid a circle of candles. The impression of her body remains in the folds of her cast-off garments.
    When Johannes's letter, from outside the house-garden-fortress, arrives (banging on the house like an intruder), the interior Other Condition of aloneness with God or herself, is destroyed, and day by day its illuminations fade away. In one of the last moments of the story, Veronica makes ephemeral contact with a person passing outside the door of the house. Through the crack under the door, the light from the candle she holds in her hand shines on the stranger's body, like fingers touching him; the air from the outside slips up her shift, under which she is naked. Inside and outside tentatively come in contact. She avoids Demeter, the bestial brother, on the stairs, but though the story is over, life is not.
   What new Other Condition, what new Crystalization will be formed out of the facets of reality? Anything is possible, if we take Walter Pater's advice and refuse to "form habits" and strive, as much as possible, "to burn always, with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy".

The Architecture of Possibility, an Essay on Lapsus Lima/The Nightjar

I encountered a fascinating woman (on Twitter), who invited me to write this little essay for her alluring online journal. Read the whole thing (and enjoy the rest of the journal) here:

http://www.lapsuslima.com/musils-possibility/

Book Launch and Reading: Save the Date

A reading and book launch, hosted by Contra Mundum Press, of my new translation of Robert Musil's Unions: Two Stories, on Sunday evening, June 23rd at 7 p.m. at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Avenue (at St. Marks) in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, hopefully in their garden. 

And please spread the word to any other people who might be interested! 

More details to follow. 

And here is information about the book: 

http://contramundum.net/2019/03/17/unions/

Musil's Writings on Theater: excerpts in new Columbia Journal

Musil would have been quite chagrined to not have his name on the cover of the new Columbia Journal #57, though Patti Smith and Eileen Myles are there, both, I believe, admirers of his work. Probably, had they been asked, they would have been proud to have their names next to his. He was known to complain about such things from his (rightfully) disgruntled position as under-appreciated genius, second-best to the "Grossschriftsteller" (Big-shot writer)Thomas Mann, and other lesser lights who captured the public's attention. But, in any case, he is inside, in the form of a number of excerpts from my new translation project: Theater Symptoms: Robert Musil's Plays and Writings on Theater (coming out with Contra Mundum Press in 2020).  The pieces are included thanks to Ellyn Gaydos, non-fiction editor of this edition of the journal (and brilliant writer).

There is a wonderful piece on Russian Cabaret, one on Yvette Guilbert, and some slashing and burning criticism of the shallow emptiness of contemporary theater. Musil thought that theater should be earth-shaking, challenging, transformative, and he lamented the relative insipidity of the theater of his times, seeing it as a reflection of the general cultural collapse. Read it and weep.
http://columbiajournal.org/announcing-columbia-journal-issue-57/

More on Lispector: Not Just a Depiction of Another Victim of Patriarchy

I promised I would return to conclude my reflections when finished, but I am far from feeling conclusive about the last part of Clarice Lispector's The Besieged City, which is to say: it resonates and reverberates and is probably not fathomable. There were more objects and more animals and I became more and more convinced that Lucrecia, the novel's main voice and main eyes, was not merely a cipher for the objectified woman.
Sometimes I wonder if I am reading the same book as other people. I mean, Benjamin Moser's introduction was beautiful and evocative, and it told me many things I did not know, but I just cannot understand how he could characterize Lucrecia in this way or suggest that female objectification is a central theme of the book. Male objectification is just as prevalent as female objectification. And female agency just as prevalent as male in my reading. But not only Moser's introduction, but the New Directions blurb iterates this reading, starting with these words: "Underneath Lispector's inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society." It is as if the publishers wanted to reduce Lispector's complex and nuanced depiction of female power and powerlessness to a stereotypical narrative of more of the same. How really belittling that is, both to Lispector's vision and to women in general, as if we were that trapped. This seems to be a pattern, and a dangerous one.
What is really in the novel is much more than more of the same. Much more than a depiction of a victim of patriarchy. There is even a whole chapter towards the end when an older woman admires the beauty of one of Lucrecia's former flames, a young man who is barely capable of uttering a simple sentence. Still, he is a "gem"...all because of his beauty. Lucrecia had admired him earlier in the book, saying she doubted she would ever have another chance to have such a beautiful man. Women do make objects of men, too, in and out of literature. Lucrecia, although married by the end of the book, develops a passion for another man and pursues him with quite a lot of agency, despite his attempts to elude her. She also completes her siege of the city which is her alter ego or strange double, noting its progress (due, in her mind, to her own seeing, her own work in constructing it and fostering it). The city develops from a rural outback smelling of stables (with horses) to a modern city of restaurants and street cars (the horses driven out of town). Shall we infer that she too has been civilized, modernized, stripped of her animality and relationship to nature?

Perhaps not. Once these sieges are complete, the other man conquered, her husband dead of a heart attack, Lucrecia is ready to move on to her next conquest, a new husband, perhaps a new city. Hardly a meek object of any reader's predatory desire. As I mentioned in the last post, Lucrecia's vision of the world may not constitute a great work of genius, but she is attempting to take possession and to delineate her world. She is an artist, if not a great one. As Lispector writes in a letter directed to a critic of the novel included at the end of the book, "'The struggle to reach reality--that's the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things....One of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit. Lucrecia doesn't manage to do this--so she 'clings' to that reality, takes as her own life the wider life of the world". And this merging with the world, this self-identification with objects, with the wild horses, and with the modernizing metropolis that will drive away these horses is effected by means of a language that is almost hallucinatory at times. Ecstatic and vivid, sharp and shimmering, as if the terrible distance between word and thing, signifier and signified, seeing and thing seen, symbol and symbolized, observer and observed were--for one fraction of an impossible second--dissolved. This mystical siege of reality by the imagination, written by a woman about a woman's imagination, is much more interesting than just another tale of another helpless victim of patriarchy.

Objects, Animals, and Personhood (Womanhood Especially) in Musil and Lispector

Clarice Lispector. Look at those seeing eyes!

I have been reading Clarice Lispector's novel, The Besieged House, newly translated by Johnny Lorenz and published by New Directions. And this after just being so immersed in my own translations of Musil's two novellas in Unions. All of the stories depict women who are deeply preoccupied with objects, subjectivity, animals, and the sometimes fluid, sometimes rigid boundaries between them. For another essay I was writing, on women who like to look, the good parts of objectification, female mate choice in the animal world, and the animistic vision of things, I had been thinking about all of this for some time, remembering all of the brilliant depictions of objects coming to life in Modernist fiction, objects with trembling boundaries, objects that then play dead or dumb as their suspicious "owners" try to glimpse their fugitive aliveness. Consider Hofmannstahl's famous "Lord Chandos Letter" and his less famous "Letter from One Who Has Returned" (which you can read here in my translation: https://issuu.com/contramundum/docs/hfa___9.1.2015 ), or the things seen dissolving and coming back into form in so many Virginia Woolf novels; consider the gaze of Malte Laurids Brigge in Rilke's novel, the nauseated narrator who is learning to see, or Sartre's Roquentin. In Musil's two novellas in Unions, the objects sometimes mock the fraught women who gaze upon them, sometimes bring comfort in their solidity and seeming unconsciousness (oh, to be an unconscious thing, the women seem to think, without my constant analyzing neuroses!), and in the opening scene in the first novella, they echo the harmony between the married couple in a shimmering almost still-life, its stillness only interrupted by the sound of tea hitting the bottom of a china cup. And for the heroine of Lispector's novel, Lucrecia, who feels she must work very hard to constantly see objects, delineate and name them, keep them in their places, or even to somehow create and recreate them in her dreams, the object world is a constant obsession. Since this is a blog and not an academic paper, I am not going to bother to furnish examples from the texts. Believe me, they are there. Find them yourselves if you just graze the pages!
     Animals, too, are essential to the women in these stories, most obviously to Veronica in the second novel in Musil's Unions and to Lucrecia in Lispector's novel, but also to Claudine of "The Completion of Love," whose reflections often turn to animal metaphors, and to the question of animal consciousness/unconsciousness, and to the sometimes tenuous and even dissolved boundary between human and animal desire. Lucrecia's animals are horses, and she imagines at times that she herself is a horse, walking on hooves. Veronica, of course, concentrates on some chickens copulating before her eyes and a memory of a beloved dog, but general animal metaphors are rife, as she wishes she could be like an animal, simply doing things (particularly erotic or maybe violent things) without consciousness, compunction, or social awareness or consequence.
    What is going on here? Why all these objects, why these animals? And what could it all have to do with the other concerns (philosophical, erotic, narrative, aesthetic, social) of these works of fiction? Reading Lispector has helped me to clarify some presentiments that were haunting me in Unions. Benjamin Moser, who edited The Besieged City and wrote its introduction, opines that Lucrecia represents the objecthood of women in Lispector's novel, that Lispector is embodying Simone de Beauvoir's concept of the objectified woman who is seen but does not see. Strange that he says this, since most of the novels pages are filled with Lucrecia seeing! Yes, she is orchestrating her role and her pose as a woman in a world where her attractiveness is important to her identity, but she is much more. She is the agent and the subject of her own objectivity and the objectivity of the world, the city, the people and things around her. She is, in fact, an artist of her world, not necessarily a good one or a successful one, but her self-appointed task is to see and to create the city and herself, so they may be seen by others. That is the work of an artist. And the creation of a woman writer, who herself is doing just that. Just as many readers might see Claudine, of Musil's "The Completion of Love" as an object of the predatory male gaze, helpless and victimized, I see her as an agent of her own desires, who is engaged in a quest to discover her self through a risky experiment. She gives her self or at least her body to men to test her own boundaries, to find her self and to "complete" the very strong love she has for her husband. She is not a victim, but a woman experimenting with the boundaries of her own autonomy by transgressing them.
    Lucrecia is a virgin and for her everything is still frustratingly held at bay. She feels the space between self and other person and other thing almost painfully. I feel that something in her longs for and is terrified of being besieged, being displaced by another's presence in her body and mind. A man inside one's body and mind tends to push one's self out of the way (not to mention a baby, which literally sucks a mother's consciousness and life-blood!), or at least to fill up a great deal of who one is. To become one with another person is both an eclipse of and an expansion of self (in "The Completion," the narrator suggests that by merging together Claudine and her husband cut off the world, but expand the space inside their two-selves; also, they seem to cut off roads to different abandoned but still hearkening parts of themselves that cannot live within the new structure of the marriage). When Claudine goes on a solitary journey, she comes back to her self and the abandoned parts haunt her.  Veronica, who is a virgin like Lucrecia, discovers her sensuality, which was confused between the attentions of two men. Lucrecia, lone, separate, inviolate, virginal, never yet breached by another, feels awkwardly out of touch with the things and people outside her borders. She is hyper vigilant about her own role of keeping the world in order. What cataclysm awaits were the world, the city, her body, besieged?  How is such a siege accomplished? Will it hurt? Will I still be myself? Will I still be whole? Or will I finally be made whole?
   Yeats said that Virginity renews itself with the moon. Thus all lovers know that the renewal of the act of love and the pauses in between does not solve the problem of self and other, or of animality and consciousness, or personhood and objecthood, subjectivity and objectivity, but that all of conscious life is an interplay between all of these states and that one must find multiple perspectives and ways of seeing (and being seen), all valid, but some more life-affirming and more fruitful than others. These woman are searching for the best ways to be their selves with others, in and out of the world. No easy task for anyone, but possibly more challenging for women, or for women who affirm their own role in making the world through seeing.
   I will come back and conclude when I have finished reading Lispector's novel, but for now I reach out my hand to you in an invitation to consider these questions with me....

UNIONS, Forthcoming April 15th

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Unions: Two Stories, by Robert Musil, translated and with an introduction by yours truly, will be out on April 15th, the anniversary of Musil's death. Beautifully typeset and designed by Contra Mundum's Alessandro Segalini, our book is graced with a cover featuring a painting by Musil's wife, Martha, allegedly inscribed to the dentist with whom she conceived her daughter during her second marriage (to Herr Marcovaldi), an incident which is referred to in the first story of the collection. Both the stories in Unions were inspired by Martha's experiences and psyche, and, as such, I feel that this book, especially in our edition, is Martha's book, issued in her honor. I have also dedicated my introduction to my sister, Simone Ellin, and all the other non-biological sisters in my life. It is a woman's book, about women's desire, though written by a man. An amazing act of ventriloquism, translated into English and, I like to think, somehow, now, translated back into a woman's voice.

Mark Mirsky inspired me to translate these stories, with a query about the original text of the first one, and it will appear in his magazine Fiction, some time in the spring. Rainer J. Hanshe, Contra Mundum's driving force, sustained me through the difficult task in all its phases, supplying invaluable insight into questions large and small.

You can read the description and advance order here: http://contramundum.net/2019/03/17/unions/

New Musil Translations!

I have recently finished a new translation of Musil's novella collection, Unions (Vereinigungen), which only appears in English in Wilkin's and Kaiser's collection called Five Women. Originally, in German, it was its own book of two novellas, and the other stories in the English collection were printed in a book as Three Women. One of them, coincidentally, "The Portuguese Lady," is currently garnering some new attention due to a new independent film based upon it, which is making the rounds of the film festivals. Aside from the minor problem that Five Women grouped the two novellas of Unions together with the unrelated stories of Three Women, I came to feel that the Kaiser and Wilkins translation of Unions left much to be desired, and called for a fresh eye. These two early and very experimental stories of Musil's, entitled "The Completion [or Perfection] of Love" and "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica," are quite difficult to translate and also sometimes somewhat shocking or challenging to conventional morality. While Wilkins and Kaiser are very worthy translators, who have come up with some ingenious solutions to some of the more thorny passages in the stories, they have also normalized the stories, both in terms of their experimental prose style and in terms of their content, even to the extent of mistranslating a few key passages which they must have found too disturbing to render correctly. I will not, however, go into detail now, as all of this is explained in full in the translator's introduction, and the book should be out, with Contra Mundum Press, by the Summer of this year. The book's first story, "The Completion of Love," will also be featured in Fiction Magazine this Spring. But I will provide a few short passages below, just in time for Valentine's Day, to give some idea of the richness of the writing.

The next project is a bit more ambitious and involves the collecting and translating of Musil's plays and writings on theater, and will come out with Contra Mundum Press (again) sometime in 2020. Some excerpts from this book will be published in the upcoming Columbia Journal.

Also, a translation of Klaus Amann's Robert Musil:Literature and Politics, an extremely relevant offering of Musil's writings on the role of the writer amid the rise of Fascism, along with a marvelous commentary and introduction by Amann, will be published in 2019, with Fomite Press.

Here are some excerpts from Unions. First, a passage from "The Completion of Love":

“You really can’t come along?”

“It’s impossible: you know I have to work now to come quickly to an end.”

“But Lilli would be so glad …. ”

“Of course, of course, but it cannot be.”

“But I have no desire to travel without you ….” His wife said this while she poured the tea, and she looked over at him, as he sat in the corner of the room in a brightly-flowered armchair and smoked a cigarette. It was evening and the dark green blinds looked out toward the street, in a long row of other dark green blinds, from which nothing distinguished them. Like a pair of dark and serenely closed eyelids, they hid the radiance of this room, in which the tea poured now from out of a tarnished silver pot into the cups, touching their bottoms with a soft ring, and then seemed to grow still in its own lustrous streaming, like a twisting, transparent shaft made of tawny, light topaz …. In the slightly dented surfaces of the pot were shadows of green and grey hues, also blue and yellow; they lay quite still, as if they had flowed there together, but could not continue on. From the woman’s arm rising from the teapot, to the look with which she gazed at her husband, a transfixing, rigid triangle was drawn about them.

Indeed, it was a triangle, as one could see; but something else too, something almost physical could be felt by these two people alone inside of it; to them it seemed as if its trajectory spanned between them like a brace made of the hardest metal, holding them fast in their places and yet binding them together, even though they were so far apart, into a unit, which one could practically feel with one’s senses ... it buttressed itself in the pits of their stomachs and they felt the pressure there ... it lifted them upright from the armrests of their chairs, with unmoving faces and unwavering glances, and yet they felt a tender emotion there — something quite light it was — as though their hearts were fluttering in and out of each other like two swarms of tiny butterflies ....

The whole room hung on this thin, barely real, and yet so apparent feeling, as on a softly trembling axis, and then on the two people upon whom it depended: the surrounding objects held their breath, the light on the wall froze into golden lace ... everything was silent and waited and was there only for them; ... time, which ran through the world like an endlessly glittering thread, seemed to move through the middle of this room, and seemed to move through the middle of these people and seemed to suddenly pause and become rigid and still and glittering ... and the objects moved a little closer to each other. It was that stillness and then soft kind of sinking, as when surfaces suddenly arrange themselves to create a crystal ... and these two people, through whose midst it ran, suddenly saw each other through this holding of breath and this curving and leaning of everything all around them, as if through thousands of mirroring surfaces, and saw each other again, as if they were seeing each other for the first time ....

And now, an excerpt from "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica": 

In those days she had loved the fur of a large St. Bernard, especially the fur in the front where the broad breast muscles protrude with every step from its arched bones like two hills. There was such an overwhelming mass of hair and it was so golden brown, and it was so much like some incalculable richness and a soft boundarylessness, that her eyes became confused when they let themselves fall gently on even the smallest patch. And while she felt nothing more than a single, whole, strong feeling of liking, that tender camaraderie that a fourteen-year-old girl feels for a thing, it was almost like being in a landscape. As when one walks, and the woods are there, and the meadows, and the mountain and the field are there, and in this great order everything fits so simply, like a pebble, each thing frightfully in place. When one looks at it by itself, cautiously alive, one suddenly becomes afraid amid the awe, as if before an animal that crouches and lays motionless and waits.

But once, as she lay like that next to her dog, it seemed to her that this must have been the way giants were; with mountains and valleys of fur on their breasts, and song birds swinging in their hair, and little lice that sat upon the song birds, and — she did not know any further, but it didn’t need to have an end, and again everything was so connected, one thing after the other, and one thing pressing into the other, so that everything seemed to stand still out of an awe before all the power and order. And she thought secretly, that if the giants were to become angry, everything in this thousand-fold life would shoot out, screaming, in all directions, and deluge everything with a frightening fullness, and if they were to descend on someone in love — that would be like someone stomping down from the mountains and swooshing with the trees, and small waving hairs would grow on one’s body and creeping insects, and a voice that screams in bliss about something wholly unspeakable, and her breath would have to wrap it all inside of a swarm of animals, holding it fast.

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