Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  “And so Blindly was born: the delirious monologue of a voice in which other voices converge, intermingle and overlap, like the waves of a storm-tossed sea. The protagonist tells his own story but he also identifies with that of others, in a maelstrom of incidents at sea and sinking into the unconscious, which certainly represents a great challenge for those who translate the book—those who become in some ways a co-author, and who are obliged to seek out that order that nonetheless underlies the turmoil and storm of events and gives them meaning, purport and direction.”

  Besides having a story to tell, Magris is a consummate stylist. Some of the most striking stylistic features of the text that engaged me as translator are the recurring images, the intentionally repeated language, the deliberately long sentences, a sustained ambiguity, a tendency to paraphrase and an alternation of voices.

  Recurring images, such as the fire in the royal palace, act as leitmotifs throughout the work, and the author was quite clear that they should be described with the same words and expressions each time, creating a kind of linguistic refrain. The interaction of the words—their relationships to one another and their rhythmic pattern—was important to maintain, since the configuration often reveals subliminal meanings operating below the semantic level and contributes to a certain emotional mood. Somewhat like the chord progression in Pachelbel’s Canon, each repetition offers a slight variation on the previous one, and the recurrences of the major themes and images (the fire, the figurehead, Nelson’s blind eye, etc.) serve to heighten the intended effect. The carefully orchestrated sentences and persistent imagery signal a precise organization, a systematic organic structure, with key images and phrasing establishing patent links between recurring analogous passages.

  Intentionally repeated language is another stylistic feature. A word or phrase will very often be repeated in the same sentence or paragraph. These reiterations function as a kind of mantra, the repetition of words being also a replication of their sound and cadence.

  Deliberately long sentences that run on and on, with a level of subordinate clauses that defies generally accepted English syntax, are intentional and contribute to the tumultuous rhythm of the text. At the same time they are a syntactical expression of the protagonist’s turbulence and confused state of mind. Series without commas also contribute to the rhythm of the text, somewhat like a crescendo, building and swelling. The reader feels the intensity of the speaker’s sensations and may also be disoriented, derailed. In this way, the reader comes to share the speaker’s confusion and state of agitation. In some cases these sentences are like nested dolls, with clauses snugly nestled one inside the other, a labyrinthine maze through which the reader can arrive at different interpretations depending on how his mind moves among the various elements. Then too, there is no reason why a long sentence can’t be both clear and elegant at the same time. In Magris’s sentences, complex though they may be, no word ever seems randomly placed; rather each word seems to have a precise function. If the sentence expands and swells it’s because the experience it expresses expands and opens out.

  Sustained ambiguity is another stylistic choice intentionally embraced by Magris, perhaps because of the interest it creates by resisting the reader’s expectations. One area in which ambiguity operates is the names of individuals. As in Borges’s bibliographies, Magris chose to maintain a certain degree of uncertainty and doubt as to which names refer to actual historical figures and which are fictional. The opening sentence itself plunges us into confusion on two counts: “My dear Cogoi, to tell the truth I’m not so sure that no one is able to write a man’s life as well as he can, even though I was the one who wrote that.” The name Cogoi itself recalls a saying in Triestine dialect, “Caro Cogoi, semo cagai,” which literally means “siamo cagati,” “we’re in deep shit,” “we’re fucked.” And the reader has no way of knowing for sure whether the words “no one is able to write a man’s life as well as he can,” initially paraphrased and later cited, are actually drawn from Jorgen Jorgensen’s autobiography. (They were in fact printed in the Hobart Town Almanack, in “A shred of Autobiography,” Part 1, January 1835; Part 2, April 1838.) Add to that the fact that all language is intrinsically ambiguous, that the speaker (or speakers) rarely orients the reader, and that there is no reliable timeline of events so that settings and events must be inferred. The ambiguity ultimately extends to the identity of the speaker and other characters in the novel. The protagonist’s multi-reality, which crosses time and space boundaries, means that the narrator’s voice is in a sense duplicitous: the “I” is problematic narratively speaking since it is more than one. Moreover, the speaker himself struggles to distinguish between memory, reality, fantasy, lies and truth; consequently it is unclear which events are “real” and which occur in the landscape of his mind.

  A tendency to paraphrase is evident in the quotations, direct and indirect, which tend toward rephrasing, re-elaboration, reinterpretation and the creative addition of new elements. Sometimes these passages are indicated by quotation marks, sometimes not. Again, the ambiguity is intentional. I found these fascinating to trace, not unlike a hunt for hidden treasure. For example, the words “that my sad but instructive vicissitudes might descend unwept into the darkness of a long, silent night” paraphrase a quotation from Jorgensen’s autobiography, which reads: “the sad but instructive vicissitudes of his fate to pass by unwept and unrecorded … wrapped up in the darkness of a long and silent night—illacrymabiles.” The passage in turn harks back to Horace, Odes, IV:9: “Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona / Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles / Urgentur, ignotique longa / Nocte, carent quia vate sacro” (Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all are unknown and unwept, lost in a long night, because they lack a sacred poet to chronicle their deeds).

  Sometimes the paraphrasing takes the form of retold tales. The tale about the old woman and the lost shoe, for instance, is a retelling of the myth in which Jason loses a sandal while helping a beggar woman, the goddess Hera in disguise, across a stream; the bundle the old woman is carrying is the golden fleece. Elsewhere we find a retelling of the incident at the Symplegades, also known as the Clashing Rocks. A pair of rocks at the Bosporus that clashed together randomly, they were defeated by Jason and the Argonauts, who would have been killed by them had it not been for Phineas’s advice to let a dove fly between the rocks. Jason does so, and the bird loses only its tail feathers, and the Argonauts row mightily to get through, losing only part of the stern ornament. While in the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodios the dove flies away unscathed, in Magris’s version it plunges to its death.

  At times instead of paraphrase there is allusion, the echo of a larger passage. For example, the words “Marie is behind the door, but I don’t open it” echo a passage from Franz Kafka’s letters to Milena Jenenska: “Sometimes I have the feeling that we’re in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind the door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He is sure to open the door again, for it is a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would slowly set the room in order as though the room were like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door. Sometimes even both are behind the door and the beautiful room is empty.” Other examples of allusion include the expression “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” which evokes Winckelmann’s well-known definition of classic Greek sculpture, “edle Einfalt und stille Gröβe.” Or the phrase “Sing the sword, wield the sword,” which recalls the Scandinavian poet Snorri Sturluson, who wrote the Edda Snorra or Edda Minore, a kind of epic-mythological study of Scandinavian mythology; though he celebrated courage in war, he was said to be a coward, able to sing but not wield the sword.

  This is also a work in which we hear two different voices. As Magris himself puts it,
“It is a book in which two types of writing alternate, what the great Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato has called ‘diurnal’ and ‘nocturnal.’” In the diurnal mode, the author, while freely inventing characters and situations and allowing the characters to speak in conformance with their own logic, in some way expresses a sense of a world that he shares, articulating his own feelings and values, and fighting the good fight for the things in which he believes and against those he considers evil. The diurnal writing strives to make sense of things, to place each and every experience, no matter how painful, in a totality that embraces it and frames it in a broader context. It is a voice that attempts to bring order and clarity where there is chaos and darkness. By contrast, the second type of writing, the nocturnal mode, is the voice of chaos, and confronts the most unsettling truths, which dare not be confessed openly, and which the author himself rejects as loathsome and despicable. Magris likens it to coming face to face with one’s double or an unknown part of oneself, a self that speaks with another voice. This nocturnal voice is also the author’s, of course, despite the fact that it may betray his strong moral convictions and values. “It is a voice that expresses not what we have consciously become, but what we might have become, and what we could erupt into at times; what we could be and hope or fear we can be, like during certain sleepless nights.”

  It is the nocturnal voice we hear when the narrative erupts into a river of words, a flood, a sea—a stream of consciousness and flow of associations that becomes a torrent; when that torrent seems like a delirious, seething monologue, shouted from the bottom of a deep pit that may or may not yield up its mysteries. At other times, when the diurnal voice prevails, the prose is lyrical, lit with subtle nuances and human tenderness. At all times there is a choral narration, group therapy or tavern rant, whose multiplicity of voices may be multiple personalities, the pseudonyms of those who cannot openly attest to the truth, virtual avatars or even clones. Our perceptions flounder in this oceanic maelstrom, this veritable vortex of voices that is almost impenetrable, and we are diverted, derailed. When that happens the recurring themes and images become a kind of lifesaver, something to hold on to, like beads on a rosary, as we grope our way along.

  All in all there were Menardian choices to make. In my translation I strove to reflect the strategies of the original work by respecting the author’s intentional stylistic choices. Specifically I strove to avoid explanation and clarification of the text, any embellishment or notes to “correct” ambiguity, the introduction of any new metaphors or images, any expansion of the text that would interrupt its flow, and obscuring connections between passages by altering the author’s word choice. It was plain that inserting any clarifying text would undermine the intended ambiguity. And since “ambiguity is richness,” as the narrator of Borges’s story about Pierre Menard tells us, I resisted the urge to explicate, spell out, explain or interpret. As for syntax, I felt that maintaining the shape of the sentence was essential to the rhythm of the prose and therefore refrained from splitting or otherwise altering a sentence to make it more conforming to English usage. Semantically I was aware that the very act of substituting one word for another can affect and even alter an understanding of the original. Naturally, as the fictional translator Menard comes to realize, there are no perfect solutions for the translator, but rather a spectrum of possible choices, with compromise always part of the process. Indeed the impossibility of Menard’s task, deliberately attempting to recreate what in Cervantes was a spontaneous process, is clear from the outset.

  SOME HISTORICAL NOTES. The time frame of the novel spans nearly two centuries, from the founding of Hobart Town by Jorgen Jorgensen in 1803 to the fictional Tore’s confinement in a mental health centre in 1992. Events in between range from Jorgensen’s return to Tasmania as a convict, his brief reign as protector of Iceland and his many other adventures, to Tore’s birth in Tasmania, his family’s repatriation to Italy and subsequent return to Australia (because his father couldn’t live in a Fascist state), his later expulsion from Australia and experiences in Madrid, his emigration to Yugoslavia with the Monfalconesi sent there to construct socialism, his deportation to Goli Otok and his emigration to Australia. Though a reconstruction of the timeline would appear linear, the narrative mode is divergent or digressive, ambiguous. The historic facts come to light gradually, tangentially, obscurely, but they are present nevertheless as underpinning to the story The “rising sun,” for example, found on the Communist flag, symbolizes the socialist ideal in which the protagonist has believed for his entire life. The “Internationale’s future humanity,” a recurring motif, repeats a line from the famous Communist and socialist anthem. The battle call No pasarán, “They shall not pass,” was the cry of the anti-Francoists. The song Adonde vayas, Marmont was the so-called “Salamanca Song” that Spanish guitarists sang to deride the French army during Napoleon’s war in Spain. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the famous alliance between Stalin and Hitler in 1939 that came as a shock to many Communists. The Nelly and the Woodman are the ships that transported Tore and Jorgen respectively to Australia, the Nelly in 1951 and the Woodman in 1825. The Drusi (an Italianization of the word drug, plural druga, meaning comrade) were Titoist partisans; the term is also the title of a novel by Croatian writer Milan Rakovac, Riva i Drusi, literally “The Comrades Are Coming,” which describes events in Istria, with the arrival of the partisans, at the end of the Second World War, using a mixture of languages—Croatian, Croatian-Italian, Istrian-Croatian—typical of a border region. The Domobranci were armed Slovenian divisions allied with the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War, anti-Communist formations that wanted an independent national Slovenia of the right, free of Communists. The slogans “Trst je nas” and “Zivot damo Trst ne damo,” written on the walls, mean “Trieste is ours” and “We’ll give up our lives but we won’t give up Trieste.” And so on.

  Then there are the historical figures. Carlos Contreras, real name Vittorio Vidali, also known as the Mexicanjaguar, is one such figure, a notable leader of the international revolutionary movement, founder of the Fifth Regiment in Spain, and a Stalin supporter. Another example is Wilhelm Oberdank (Guglielmo Oberdan, 1858–1882), an Italian irredentist of Slovenian origin who was willing to die for Italy and symbolized Trieste’s return to Italy Gilas and Kardelj were prominent figures in Yugoslavian communism: Gilas, Tito’s ideologist and later a dissident intellectual, was the author of the well-known book The New Class, and Kardelj, one of Tito’s lieutenants, was one of the theoreticians who created the theory of workers’ self-management. Struensee, the spirit evoked in the séance, is Count Johann Friedrich von Struensee (1737–1772), a German doctor who became royal physician to the schizophrenic King Christian VII of Denmark and a minister in the Danish government, rising in power to a position of de facto regent. His affair with Queen Caroline Matilda caused a scandal, and was the catalyst for the intrigues and power play that caused his downfall and execution.

  Other historic notes include the dates of July 25 and September 8, which refer to notable events in 1943: the fall of Fascism and the arrest of Mussolini on July 25, followed by an armistice signed in Sicily between Italy and the Allies on September 3; later, on September 8, often cited as the date of the official birth of the Italian resistance, the king fled toward southern Italy, leaving the population in the hands of the Germans. The reference to the Chetniks describes the historical confusion that reigned during the Second World War. At one time the term Chetniks applied to Balkan partisan groups that opposed Ottoman rule at the end of the nineteenth century and later fought over Macedonia. After the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918, the term was applied to Serbian nationalists, lawfully recognized by the government of Belgrade and militarily organized, whose role was to assure the pre-eminence of the Serbian element in Yugoslavia. During the Second World War and the German occupation of Yugoslavia, there were anti-Communist Chetnik formations that collaborated with the German occupiers and their Italian allies, as well as th
ose that fought against the Germans, out of loyalty to Yugoslavia, even if they were monarchist, anti-Communist partisans and therefore opposed to the Communist partisans. Initially Chetnik partisans were aided by the Anglo-Americans, who later supported Tito instead. The leader of the Chetniks was General Mihajlovi, who was later put to death by Tito. The Ustashi, on the other hand, were Croat Fascists who supported the regime led by Paveli and who committed gruesome atrocities against the Serbian population. As we see in the novel, there was a great deal of confusion, since overlying the so-called official war between Germany and Italy on the one hand (until 1943) and Yugoslavia on the other was the struggle between Serbs and Croats, violent among ultranationalist Ustashi Croats and Chetnik Serbs, as well as the conflict between Communists and anti-Communists. After 1943, things became even more complicated, because Italy went from being Germany’s ally to being its enemy.