The Nobel Prize committee meets. Everyone agrees that the prize must this year be awarded to a US author as a parting gift toScene: Oslo, October 2016
The Nobel Prize committee meets. Everyone agrees that the prize must this year be awarded to a US author as a parting gift to one of the most internationally minded and certainly one of the most literary of Presidents.
(S Spicer #fakenews The decision was in tribute to the man who was about To Make America Great Again)
Marilynne Robinson is a popular and obvious choice.
But then some bright spark points out that there is an unwritten rule that the Prize can only be awarded to an author previously shortlisted. The Committee search the minutes of recent meetings, and to their horror there is only one name that qualifies - one that they can't bring themselves to pick.
Cue adjournment of Committee for another week and an unprecedented delay in the announcement.
Next week the Committee meets again. The resident bright spark has dug into past Ladbrokes betting odds and noticed the persistent of bizarre appearance there of Bob Dylan. He suggests that they could give him the prize: the public will assume the odds meant he had been in previous contention so won't realise the rules have been broken, and it will be 50 years before the archives are opened and their deceit is revealed.
"But that's ridiculous. We can't give the literature prize to a pop singer!" one judge complains.
"You think that is ridiculous? Have you read American Pastoral?" the others responds.
Duplicate streets, doppelganger streets, lying and deceptive streets, so to speak, reveal themselves in the depths of the city. from The Cinnamon ShopsDuplicate streets, doppelganger streets, lying and deceptive streets, so to speak, reveal themselves in the depths of the city. from The Cinnamon Shops
Fans of China Mieville's The City and The City (I'm not one! - see /review/show...) will recognise that quote, in a slightly different translation by John Curran Davis, as the epigraph and perhaps the inspiration of that novel.
And Mieville joins a long list of authors with an acknowledged debt to Bruno Schulz in their work, borrowing quotations, characters, aspects of his life (in addition to the undoubted many on whom his influence is less explicitly noted) such as:
- 2017 MBI winning David Grossman - whose See Under: Love is based around the story of Schulz's death (under the protection of one Gestapo officer in occupied Poland, he was shot in the street by a rival officer), except in his novel the narrator helps him escape his fate by turning him into a salmom
- the legendary Roberto Bolaño: the narrator of his Distant Star reads Schulz's work during the story
- Booker of Booker winning Salman Rushdie, whose Moor's Last Sigh recreates Schulz's Street of Crocodiles but in Andalucia:
I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. […] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town. (Rushdie: The Moor's Last Sigh)
- Danilo Kiš whose "family trilogy" owes a large debt to Schulz (“Schulz is my God� he told John Updike): e.g. the title of the last of the trilogy Hourglass rather echoes Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and his Treatise on the Potato therein Schulz' Treatise on Tailors' Dummies
- Jonathan Safran Foer whose Tree of Codes is formed from cutting up his favourite book of all - Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (the words Tree of Codes can be made from a subset of the letters in Street of Crocodiles)
as well as others such as Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), Philip Roth (the Czech author in The Prague Orgy is essentially Schulz) and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love).
(see for a more detailed survey)
Several of those books are based on the legend of Schulz's lost work, The Messiah, a work some scholars believe perhaps never existed. But what we have hear is the work that Schulz did complete in his brief lifetime - the two story collections The Cinnamon Streets & Other Stories (the original English language publisher chose to present it under the title of another story, The Street of Crocodiles, against the translator's wishes) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, as well as some miscellania.
The lazy reviewers guide to Bruno Schulz would be Witold Gombrowicz meets Franz Kafka, and it is not hard to apparently see the influence of the latter, particularly in The Cinnamon Shops collection:
Many of the stories concern his increasingly eccentric father, who first develops a mania for birds which starts with collecting and incubating rare eggs, but ends with him taking on avian-like characteristics himself, then becomes obsessed with cockroaches, again starting to resemble one himself (my father was turning into a cockroach). Querying his father's absence, the narrator asks his mother whether his father is now one of the cockroaches in the house, or perhaps instead the stuffed condor, the last remnant of his avian obsession, although his mother retorts: I already told you that father is travelling about the country as a travelling salesman.
Or in the labyrinth corridors of the family home, rooms that disappear or come literally alive, and also the confusion of the city's streets (see the opening quotes) or houses:
Having entered the wrong vestibule and the wrong stairwell, one usually wound up in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and passageways, unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, and one forgot the original goal of the expedition, until, many days later, while returning on some grey dawn from the uncharted territories of strange, matted adventures, one remembered amid pangs of conscience one's family home.
But to spoil the story, while Schulz was to translate Kafka into Polish, he apparently only read Kafka after he was sent a copy to review following the publication of The Cinnamon Shops. One can instead perhaps, equally lazily, suggest they drew on the same (post) Austro-Hungarian empire world of bureaucracy breaking down and mitteleuropean melancholia.
The reality is that Schulz has a surreal style all of his own - one that I can admire sometimes more than appreciate. The narrator's of Distant Star (see above) sums the effect up well: “The words went scuttling past like beetles, busy at incomprehensible tasks.�
I read Schulz's works in 2004, and again a few years later. The reason for revisiting them now is the publication of a new translation by Madeline Levine, the original works having been brought into English in the 1960-1970s by Celina Wieniewska.
I'm not, as a rule, a massive fan of retranslations of classic works. There is far too much great but untranslated literature that would better command an enthusiastic translator's attention, and much retranslation does seem to be nitpicking with the original - the occasional case where the original was badly flawed tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
Here I was pleased to see that Levine praises the 'undeniable magic of Wieniewska's English version.' She justifies retranslation generally on the grounds that "the richer the original, the more interpretations it can sustain. Translation is both a scholarly art and a performance,' which is fair enough but still leaves my concern with efficient use of translation resources.
Specifically, she argues that while her predecessor 'intended to convey the visual images and bizarre events that distinguish Schulz's stories,' she did this by 'taming his prose.' Levine's aim is to 'get closer to the texture of Schulz's prose by stretching English syntax to make it accommodate the sinousity of Schulz's longer sentences rather than reigning them in,' and also to closer mirror Schulz's repetition and alliteration and the use, as much as possible, of the prefix dis- (mirroring an equivalent Polish term).
I must admit I struggled, comparing the translations side by side, to detect such a significant difference, other perhaps than Levine drawing on a richer English vocabulary. Compare for example the literally labyrinthine sentence above to Wieniewska's version.
For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find oneself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the grey light of dawn.
See this for a further discussion:
And see also Curran Davis on the reason he did a retranslation
So overall Schulz is an author one ought to read if only for his profound influence on others. This translation will likely become the new standard, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it as a vital choice over the existing one.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC....more
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