Book reviews at European Literature Network

Over the last few years, I have been writing book reviews for the European Literature Network, which aims to promoted translated European literature for anglophone readers. Here are some of the most interesting ones:

The Girl with the Leica, by Helena Janeczek. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-jennifer-sarha-reviews-the-girl-with-the-leica-by-helena-janeczek/

Antal Szerb. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-antal-szerb-why-you-should-be-reading-him-by-jennifer-sarha/

Journeying, by Claudio Magris. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-antal-szerb-why-you-should-be-reading-him-by-jennifer-sarha/

The Impostor by Javier Cercas. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-jennifer-sarha-reviews-the-impostor-by-javier-cercas/

Zone by Mathias Enard. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/%e2%80%8erivetingreviews/

Umberto Eco: Working at the Interstices

The death of Umberto Eco – novelist, scholar, probably the best-known public intellectual in Europe – last week was a loss to the world. I have been reading and rereading his books for twenty years, both his novels and his academic works, and they have been an endless source of delight; it is a great sadness that we shall have no more. Eco’s writings reflect his remarkable mind, and the idea that everything is interesting, everything is worth exploring. There is a curiosity about the world, combined with a consistently applied seriousness: Eco might talk about Thomas Aquinas or about Italian television, but his consideration of both is equally thoughtful.

For an academic, this can have revolutionary implications – allowing your focus to expand beyond your current project, spending time thinking about something not covered by departmental research parameters. As an independent scholar, this is a pleasure I have been allowing myself more and more. It is a practice which has enriched my research as well as my quality of life.

Last summer I spent many commuter hours reading Eco’s popular non-fiction, and many lunch hours with his online interviews. My favourite is one from the Paris Review, which includes a description of Eco’s work practices:

I always say that I am able to use the interstices. (…)Our lives are full of interstices. This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.

It is a simple thought, and not new; that imaginative and intellectual labour can be achieved anywhere, that we need not be chained to our desks to work. Yet what comes across here is less the spread of work to every moment of every day (which for many of us is already ingrained) than the removal of ‘work’ from thinking. A freedom from the pressure of ‘work’ at least, from the anxiety of being productive. What if we were able to look at thinking as an opportunity, a pleasure, rather than a duty?

This pleasure of thinking is what makes Eco such a fascinating historical novelist. It’s not only that he offers detailed and accurate information about the period in question, but that he creates a plot around the crucial debates of the time. His historical context is not something in the background, a question of fashion or architecture or a few local wars, but rather it constitutes the point of the story. By showing us what people were arguing about, Eco enables us to see the cultural framework that underpins those arguments.

In the Name of the Rose we have debates about heresy, but we are made to see them as being about reconciling different political practices as much as about what constitutes religious dogma – and above all, about turning individual preferences to ideology. The question of whether laughter is compatible with Christianity might seem to us a ridiculous dilemma, but Eco’s novel demonstrates how it could constitute a reasonable query, how it works and is supported by the accepted imaginative reality to which logic can be applied. Much as we might debate about whether Han shot first, or what would have happened if Neville Longbottom had been the Chosen One, or whether Steve Rogers will ever find his Bucky. These are arguments that you have in the pub rather than on a podium.

I started rereading Baudolino over the weekend; a novel ostensibly about the creation of the Prester John legend. Like all of Eco’s novels, it’s built around an inquiry, in this case how to force Italian cities to stop fighting each other so that Frederick Barbarossa can take a break. But it’s also about how rhetoric can be used as a social strategy, and the temptations of narrative imperatives, and whether reality is constituted or informed by language, and many other things I haven’t yet got to. These are the debates Baudolino is having with his friends, with colleagues and enemies and strangers in the bar. These are, I suspect, debates which I will be having inside my head for a while.

Lisbon; or, reading poetry in a language you don't (quite) know

Two months ago I was in Lisbon, climbing the hill of Alfama in order to visit the Castelo São Jorge. I had just arrived from London and Lisbon was full of sunshine; I had already decided that this was the most beautiful city in the world.

Castelo São Jorge, a Moorish citadel captured by the Portuguese Christians in 1147 (José Saramago’s novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon investigates this event) consists of a fortified area at the top of one of Lisbon’s seven hills. It contains the ruins of a fortress, a small archaeological museum, a dilapidated garden enclosure with fountains, a courtyard with a miradouro (a view-seeing terrace), and ramparts covering half the citadel which overlook the city of Lisbon. It’s one of the few parts of Lisbon that survived the earthquake of 1755, and offers fantastic views as well as historically interesting architecture.

The Castelo São Jorge was the first thing I had wanted to see in Lisbon, and I began my excursion with a walk around the walls – mostly so that I could continue looking at Lisbon from on high as well as making happy sighs because everything was so amazingly beautiful. There were stone benches for people to sit on, a wine-kiosk and a café; it was clearly a space made for slow meandering. This was an approach I was prepared to take, and so I meandered. Noticing some writing on a nearby bench, I meandered closer to have a look, and discovered a poem by Sophia de Brello Meyner.

© J. J. sarha

Here’s the thing – standing in front of this bench you are at the top of the tallest hill in Lisbon, with the city on your right and the estuary of the river Tejo on your left. There is a lot of water and a lot of sky, and a lot of pale buildings to reflect the water and the sky. There’s a lot of light. This is pretty much the perfect place in the world to read that poem – reading it there will punch you right in the feelings. What interests me is that someone had decided to place this bench there and to engrave it with poetry; someone had decided that this is what people should think and feel when they stand there. 

Specifically, this is what English-speaking people should experience – people who probably won’t know anything about Sophia de Mello Breyner or about Portuguese poetry, but who ought to know that this poetry exists, and that it is something that can contribute the view in front of them.

A good decision, I thought. I came home and looked into Sophia de Mello Breyner, and discovered that she was a renowned twentieth-century writer, famous for writing children’s stories as well as poetry, and that she had been a critic of Salazar’s dictatorship and had briefly served as an MP for the Socialist Party. She is the second woman to have been buried in the Pantheon after Amalia Rodrigues. 

Three of Sophia de Mello Breyner’s collections have been translated into English. Nevertheless, I was interested to see how her poetry would work in Portuguese – I am a translator by hobby (and occasionally by profession), and while my Portuguese is, ahem, limited, I was eager to see the structure of the poems as well as any sonal qualities that might be missed in the English version. My academic translations tend to aim towards word for word transmission rather than elegantly formed English, so I was also curious to see what kind of a poetic tension could take place between two languages.

What I found was A Bilingual Anthology of  28 Portuguese Poets, translated by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin. It includes a general introduction to modern Portuguese poetry – very useful for a newbie like me – and on page 5, there was this:

Thinking is a discomfort, like walking in the rain

When the wind kicks up and it seems to rain harder.

Pensar incomoda como andar à chuva

Quando o vento cresce e parece que chove mais.

The author is Alberto Caiero, a shepherd-poet who mostly writes about sheep – this poem is called ‘The Keeper of Sheep’. Or rather, the author is Fernando Pessoa, the most famous Portuguese poet of the twentieth century, and Alberto Caiero is one of his heteronyms: fictional poetic personas with separate biographies, styles, and interests. Alberto Caiero is a shepherd-poet, but there is also Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, and Ricardo de Reis, a classicist (further immortalised in another Saramago novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which Reis returns from Brazil after Pessoa’s death and has interactions with his ghost). Pessoa’s best-known work is The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego), written from the perspective of Bernardo Soares, an assistant book-keeper. (This is a book I’d brought with me to Lisbon, and consumed as appropriate with Portuguese wine, occasionally reading out loud to my travel companion. It’s about a depressed alcoholic trying to escape from or delve into his own brain, and it’s wonderful.) Being able to read Fernando Pessoa in the original is one of the reasons I am studying Portuguese.

But there were other gems in this anthology; for example, Eugénio de Andrade, a friend of Sophia de Mello Breyner and a translator of Federico Garcia Lorca.

OUTROS RITMOS, OUTROS MODOS

Não é o mar, não é o vinto, é o sol

que me dói da cintura aos sapatos.

Sol de fins de julho,

ou de agosto a prumo: finas

agulhas de aço.

É o sol destes dias, aceso

na folhagem.

Bebendo a minha água.

Colado à minha pele.

É doutro território, doutro areal.

Tem outros ritmos, outros modos,

outros vagares para roer

a cal, morder-me os olhos.

Até quando cega canta ao arder.

It isn’t the sea, it isn’t the wind, it’s the sun

that aches in me from my waist to my shoes.

The sun of late July,

or perpendicular in August: fine

needles of steel.

It is the sun of these days, burning

in the foliage.

Drinking my water.

Stuck to my skin.

It’s from another realm, another stretch of sand.

It has other rhythms, other modes,

other lazing times in which to gnaw

limestone, bite my eyes.

Even as it blinds, it sings as it burns.

I’ve been studying Portuguese with Duolingo since May – I have a basic grasp of grammar and some vocabulary, but I would struggle to have a conversation beyond ‘two tickets please’. My Portuguese is enough, however, to engage with this poem; I know that ‘não’ means ‘no’, and while the English translation of the first line is both accurate and pleasing, looking at the Portuguese version tells me that there is an emphasis on the ‘no’. This in the English version is given to the objects it denies, the sea and the wind and the sun. Portuguese, like Latin but unlike English, is somewhat flexible with word order, which allows such emphasis to be allocated.

Examining the sentence structure from the third line onwards, I am able to note that the sun becomes the focal point of the argument, and that it maintains this centrality until the end. The English translation makes it clear that the sun constitutes the question which the poem is trying to answer; why does it work the way it does, on our eyes and on our skin? The sun in Lisbon is everywhere – I know myself that it can give both sunburn and lots of feelings – but does it borrow that light from somewhere else, other rhythms, other modes (outros ritmos, outros modos)? Is this why it works so insidiously? The Portuguese in this poem may be beyond my skills to translate, but reading it like this still allows me to interact with it. It also tells me things about how poetic rhythms work in Portuguese and how assonance can be made to serve rhyme.

My anthology is full of equally exciting texts, but I’m going to limit myself to just one sonnet, ‘Standing at Fearful Attention’ by Alexandre O'Neill.

Perfilados de medo, agradecemos

o medo que nos salva da loucura.

Decisão e coragem valem menos

e a vida sem viver é mais segura.

Aventureiros já sem aventura,

perfilados de medo combatemos

irónicos fantasmas à procura

do que não fomos, do que não seremos.

Perfilados de medo, sem mais voz,

o coração nos dentes oprimido,

os loucos, os fantasmas somos nós.

Rebanho pelo medo perseguido,

já vivemos tão juntos e tão sós

que da vida perdemos o sentido…

Standing at fearful attention, we’re grateful

to fear, which keeps us from going mad.

Decision and courage are bad

for our health; life without living is safer.

Explorers whose exploits are history,

standing in fear we struggle against

ironic ghosts in our ongoing quest

for what we weren’t and never will be.

Standing in fear with no voice of our own,

just teeth that gnash on our hearts in fury,

we are the madmen, we are the ghosts.

A flock of sheep pursued by fear,

we live so together and so alone

that life’s meaning has disappeared.

Sources:

Richard Zenith (ed.), 28 Portuguese Poets. A Bilingual Anthology (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2015).