As soon as I read anything that smacks of my family's origins, I wriggle or turn away. In the middle of last night, awake at an even more ludicrous hour than usual, I read one of the Odessa stories by Isaac Babel and suddenly saw what I was reading: between Dashiell Hammett and my grandparents. I have been ill lately. My defences are lowered. I couldn't read Babel or his like while my parents were alive. Three of their parents came from north-east of Odessa, Bessarabia, as Babel calls it, as I did before I called it Russia, or Romania, or Moldova.
The name, elusive as Bessarabia/Romania/Moldova, is everything. If Odessa is a summary of whatever I wriggle from, so be it. I was pleased once to be described by a fellow jew as 'one of the Odessa crowd'.
In its tribal regalia, Odessa defeats me. I have no aptitude for the dense colours of these stories. Quickly I feel overwhelmed by rich tapestries of people strutting their noms de guerre. Social fabric I don't know how to weave, how to believe. I wriggle and turn away. Glimpses are all I can manage. I prefer Joseph Roth's Job: internal, uncomprehending, bottomlessly sad, engaged with a room and its outside, a family—if that—and its fragility.
I am happy to learn that in Odessa there were kefir makers, and that Bessarabia was a lush place with wine that smelled of sun and bedbugs. And I am always pleased to see the Yiddish term of endearment, bubbeleh, on the page. Babel's Odessa, up to almost including the pogrom, is linguistically riotous, seductive and vivid. Boris Dralyuk, the Pushkin Press translator, grew up there.
This language has lain mostly undisturbed all my life, just beneath my awareness; and my will. Inflections, inversions, a tone of complaint and triumph, a patois I could not accept as my father would have wanted. I had to invent my own. That was, and is still, the thing.
Showing posts with label Pushkin Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pushkin Press. Show all posts
Friday, 25 November 2016
Friday, 8 August 2014
At eight a.m. in a small carpark by a busy road, people are going to work, carrying takeout coffee, adjusting headphones and other transitional objects. In their warrior boots and haircuts, they have no honour to strip, no petticoats to rustle; they aren’t intent on becoming employee of the month; there’s a gruffness about their gait; work is penury, if that, especially in the summer.
I’m waiting in the car, reading Chapter 6 of Stefan Zweig’s Casanova, my last thing at night book of the moment. So early in the morning, this is practically joined-up reading.
Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity was at the end of the bookshelves in my parents’ house; as a child I dusted the shelves for modest payment, annually, checking each book as I went. The black cloth binding, the slow foreign surname at the end of the alphabet, the complicated title, made Zweig a severe choice I wasn’t yet ready for.
In 1998, Pushkin Press published a new translation of Casanova, the first volume of a Zweig series. Translation is the aerodynamics of literature, propelling the reader not only from German to English, in this case, also from the 21st to the 18th century, via the 1920s and 30s, the Austria of Zweig’s origin, the Italy of his subject, and the French of his subject’s memoirs; accommodating Heath Ledger as Casanova in his beguiling, effortless youth, Peter O’Toole as the ageing Casanova, who, out of habit though with little outcome other than pathos, engages the attention of the maid as he writes his memoirs; as well as, for this reader, Moonlight Cruise, spoils of a CND jumble sale of my youth, about the man who hated women and the woman who hated men, en passant par the man who loved women.
Chapter six of Casanova is Homo Eroticus, a comparison of Casanova and Don Juan, the bene and the malefactor, the lover and the hater of women whose lifeworks strangely resemble each other. Casanova’s memoirs are a catalogue of conquest; he stands better over the myth he generated than his amorous exploits, which, like anything else relentlessly pursued, becomes tedious and curiously unemotional. These are operas of the flesh, no more, without moral undertow or spiritual aspiration.
Don Juan on the other hand is all tortured aspiration and warped morality. His catalogue of conquest represents the growing stock of honour he has stolen and tragedies wreaked upon women who will hate him forever.
Don Giovanni is all I know of Don Juan. In Mozart’s music can you hear the honour and the savagery? In the evening I listen again. I don’t hear Don Juan I hear Mozart acting and Mozart from within, the savagery converted into beauty: the menace of a fugue, as we move into the end of Act 1, the grievance of Donna Elvira halfway through Act 2: he stripped me of my honour, he betrayed me, woe and vengeance.
For many years I wanted literature to be contentless (which is easier if it’s in a language not native to you), not looking through the glass of art but at it. I have also been chastised for listening to music in the same way. Passion and how it translates into music, into beauty; that’s what I hear. A convolute way of coming to the humanity of music perhaps, but, once established, indissoluble.
Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity was at the end of the bookshelves in my parents’ house; as a child I dusted the shelves for modest payment, annually, checking each book as I went. The black cloth binding, the slow foreign surname at the end of the alphabet, the complicated title, made Zweig a severe choice I wasn’t yet ready for.
In 1998, Pushkin Press published a new translation of Casanova, the first volume of a Zweig series. Translation is the aerodynamics of literature, propelling the reader not only from German to English, in this case, also from the 21st to the 18th century, via the 1920s and 30s, the Austria of Zweig’s origin, the Italy of his subject, and the French of his subject’s memoirs; accommodating Heath Ledger as Casanova in his beguiling, effortless youth, Peter O’Toole as the ageing Casanova, who, out of habit though with little outcome other than pathos, engages the attention of the maid as he writes his memoirs; as well as, for this reader, Moonlight Cruise, spoils of a CND jumble sale of my youth, about the man who hated women and the woman who hated men, en passant par the man who loved women.
Chapter six of Casanova is Homo Eroticus, a comparison of Casanova and Don Juan, the bene and the malefactor, the lover and the hater of women whose lifeworks strangely resemble each other. Casanova’s memoirs are a catalogue of conquest; he stands better over the myth he generated than his amorous exploits, which, like anything else relentlessly pursued, becomes tedious and curiously unemotional. These are operas of the flesh, no more, without moral undertow or spiritual aspiration.
Don Juan on the other hand is all tortured aspiration and warped morality. His catalogue of conquest represents the growing stock of honour he has stolen and tragedies wreaked upon women who will hate him forever.
Don Giovanni is all I know of Don Juan. In Mozart’s music can you hear the honour and the savagery? In the evening I listen again. I don’t hear Don Juan I hear Mozart acting and Mozart from within, the savagery converted into beauty: the menace of a fugue, as we move into the end of Act 1, the grievance of Donna Elvira halfway through Act 2: he stripped me of my honour, he betrayed me, woe and vengeance.
For many years I wanted literature to be contentless (which is easier if it’s in a language not native to you), not looking through the glass of art but at it. I have also been chastised for listening to music in the same way. Passion and how it translates into music, into beauty; that’s what I hear. A convolute way of coming to the humanity of music perhaps, but, once established, indissoluble.
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