by Robert Musil
For Musil, language is that most precious treasure, that cloth soaked in blood, sweat and tears, preserving the imprint of the ineffable.
Together these two texts comprise an attempt to paint an internal psychic landscape as much sensed as seen. Whether or not Musil succeeded, a question each reader will ultimately have to answer for him – or herself, it is a rich and daring experiment that broke new ground.
A word about the translation.
Each sentence meanders in the German according to a logic of its own, sometimes ignoring, sometimes subverting standard rules of grammar and syntax to wrap itself around a sentient mind and portray reality from the inside out. The primary challenge for the English translator obliged to follow in the author’s footsteps, emulate and transpose his dance steps into a coherent routine, is how in another language to follow the fever chart of emotion, let the English words echo the ungainly awkwardness of consciousness, and in the process even to risk translating badly, as the writer risked writing badly, and so risk displeasing the reader. Not every train of thought arrives at the station, some get sidetracked along the way and stall for lack of tracks.
The effect is an oftentimes bewildering flood of language let loose, unfettered syntax, sentences freed of the need to tell, a true-to-life string of uncertainties, and as such a realistic portrayal of the messy business of living.
When Kathrin Rosenfield, a noted Austrian literary scholar living in Brazil, who, with the help of her companion, Lawrence Flores Pereira, himself a celebrated scholar and translator, both dear friends, translated the little book into Portuguese, and challenged me to tackle it in English, I hesitated at first. I had had a bit of a success with my English translation of Musil’s last book, Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten, in my rendering, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, now in its third edition, and ordinarily I never translate two books by the same writer. But Kathrin being Kathrin and Musil being Musil, I took up the challenge, in part as a project to propose to the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur to land a fellowship in Vienna.
I got the fellowship and fumbled through the translation.
Permit me to confess that I cursed my friends Kathrin and Lawrence, Musil, and myself countless times along the way for my having been foolhardy enough to even attempt the task of channeling Musil’s idiosyncratic German into semi-intelligible English, and was about to give up more than once.
Even the title proved a knotty dilemma. Vereinigungen ought literally to be translated as Unions. But lest the unknowing prospective reader misconstrue Musil’s slender volume as an exposé on trade unions or a prophetic look forward at the European Union, I had to find a title that would evoke both the texture of the prose and the thematic dialectic of intimacy and estrangement. So I settled on Intimate Ties, though I might well have gone for Intimate Distance.
I have already quoted a few examples of the many impossibly long and convoluted sentences on which I almost choked in translation. I will not here dwell on the discordant strings of similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech, and all the subsidiary clauses I had to wade through and transpose into an equivalent English so as to faithfully render the style of the telling and the soul of the story. I admit that I cried out with joy and relief when I was done, putting myself metaphorically in the sandals of Lawrence of Arabia after crossing the impassable Nefud Desert and first catching sight of the sparkling waters off the Red Sea port of Aqaba.
I hope that the reader will derive some pleasure from my pains.
Peter Wortsman
Vienna 2016 – New York 2017
Acknowledgements
The translator wishes to express his profound gratitude to Kathrin Rosenfield for prodding him to undertake this translation, to Tess Lewis for introducing him to the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur, to that organization and its executive director, Dr. Manfred Müller, for granting him the luxury of a stay in Vienna to advance in the task, to the Austrian Cultural Forum for support of this publication, and as always, to Jill Schoolman, for inspiring and publishing the impossible.
