Homogenised Tongues

“Look!” he said. “The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!” – Genesis 11:9

 

Looking ahead

Where will it all end? Well, at the end of The Forever War Joe Haldeman envisioned an Earth where mankind has been distilled down to its essence: Man, a single version of humanity who reproduces by means of cloning. This is how Haldeman describes these future humans:

After the air cycled and we'd popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hall at the end of the corridor to our left.

[…]

We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.

[…]

The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. "These books are for your convenience," he said, also with perfect accent, "and you don't have to read them if you don't want to. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, because you're free men and women. The war is over."

When I read this book the first time many years ago I was too engrossed in the story to pick up on the fact that these two spoke with perfect English accents. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Now it jumps out at me. The collective known as Man are of one mind as one might expect since they speak one tongue because language and thought are inextricably connected.

In another vision of the future of language, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government sets about to restrict human thought and its chosen weapon against inappropriate thought is language, Newspeak, their aim being groupthink. The word isn’t used in the book—it was coined in 1952 and the nod to Orwell is obvious—but the mentality is endorsed as explained by O’Brien:

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

In an essay 'The Future of Language', poet Saul Williams notes that “a Latin transcription of the word 'person' is 'being of sound'.” Even when I’m not talking out loud I can still ‘hear’ words in my head and often I can’t get to sleep because of them. Words are hugely important to me as a writer but I suspect that they’re also far more important to most people than they probably appreciate. Because they’re around us and within us all the time it’s too easy to take them for granted. There is a scene in the film Lenny (a biopic of the comedian Lenny Bruce) where, after the cops have taken away his cabaret card and the high cost of lawyers has driven Lenny into bankruptcy, he disastrously represented himself in court. In one scene, he pitifully begs the judge, “Don’t take away my words. Please don’t take away my words!” The words he was referring to were swearwords (often called, rather sweetly, ‘colourful language’) because, as the real Bruce himself this time put it: “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government’.”

Language these days feels a lot safer than it used to be unless you live in a country with odd ideas about freedom of speech. New words are created every year and others fall into disuse—language is, and always will be, a fluid thing—and I can’t imagine even in the dim and distant future new things not needing names but I wonder about how colourful those names will be. Brannon Braga, one of the producer/writers behind Star Trek on television, said in 2001 as they wrapped up Star Trek: Voyager, "I don't think I could have written another line of dialogue for Voyager. I really had just about had it with the 24th Century." Why? Because the language was so controlled. Data says, “Shit,” once in Star Trek: Generations but I think that was about it as far as colourful language goes.

No doubt, like me, sometime during your childhood you got sat down with a tin of paints and left to entertain yourself. At first you use the colours one at a time taking care to clean the brush before moving onto another colour. Later perhaps it dawns on you to mix two or three colours in the tin’s lid but the more colours you mix the less interesting the result is until all you have is a pool of sludge. Why that should come as a surprise I don’t get because that’s always the colour of the water when we’re done.

In films and television shows when they want to distinguish between the past and the present they often switch between black and white and colour. It’s an effective technique and I’ve got nothing against it other than the fact that, in some respects, they’ve got it back to front; the past should be in colour and the present in black and white. Perhaps it was simply me being a kid but the older I get the blander the world seems. Walk down the chocolate and sweets aisle in Tesco and ask yourself where are all the packs of Old English Spangles have gone, the Cabanas, the Treets, the Aztec Bars, the Pacers, the Bar Sixes (and the Bar Noirs), the Nutty Bars, Secrets, Golden Cups, Five Boys, Mint Cracknells or the Amazin Raisin Bars… No, it’s just the same old ones, the Mars Bars, the Flakes, the Dairy Milks. Dull, dull, dull.

 

Looking back

Which brings me to my new book which I’m hoping very few people will think is dull, dull, dull. It’s called Making Sense and consists of nineteen thematically-linked stories, four of which I want to talk about today. ‘Zeitgeist’, ‘Disintegration’, ‘Funny Strange’ and ‘Monsters’ are all written in dialect: two—‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘Disintegration’—are in Glaswegian, ‘Funny Strange’ is in Cockney and ‘Monsters’ is in New Yorkese.

[W]hat is the difference between a dialect and a language? Perhaps the most obvious categorisation is size. Dialects are viewed as smaller subcategories of larger languages. So, Italian is made up of the standard version, along with Lombard, Bergamasque, Ennese, Messinese etc. Of course not all of these dialects meet the criteria to be considered a language but when a dialect varies so much from the language to which it is linked, should it not be given a language status? Dialects in many countries bear no resemblance to the language they supposedly stem from, whilst in others it is clear that there are only minor differences.

Take Lombard for example, it is considered by official standards to be an Italian dialect but in the Ethnologue publication it is listed as a language. It is the same for the majority of dialects in Italy, despite the fact that many of them are not immediately recognisable as being related to Italian – ‘The difference between a dialect and a language’, Veritas

I like the Yiddish expression: A language is a dialect with an army and navy. Hits the nail on the head, doesn’t it?

Ethnologue defines Scots as a language but to be honest most of the people I know speak a version of Scottish English and the simple fact is that nowadays in Scotland it’s not so much the words people use—their dialect—that identifies where they’re from but the way they pronounce them—i.e. their accents. Compare in your head Billy Connolly and Sean Connery and you get a pretty good impression of the east/west divide; there’s a north/middle/south divide too.

A rare video featuring both men

There are still some hangers-on—in Glasgow children are still being called ‘weans’ and I imagine in Edinburgh they’re still being called ‘bairns’—but little by little many of the expressions I was familiar with as a child are dying out; the occasional Scotticism creeps into my writing and I generally let it stand not so much out of a sense of nostalgia but because these are good words and they deserve to be preserved. So when I started writing my story ‘Zeitgeist’ which is about a man out of time it felt only right to give him a strong regional accent. Here’s how the story opens:

Ma wife sez Ah’m too serious.

“Whit d’ye mean, wumman, too serious?”

“Ah dunno, Ben, jist too serious.”

“World’s a serious place, hen.”

“Don’t Ah know it, but do yoo need tae be so serious?”

“Listen, hen, Ah’m ower forty noo. Ah ’hink it’s time Ah goat a wee bit serious noo an’ again.”

“Suit yersel’. Jist don’t come mopin’ t’ me aboot the meanin’ o’ life. Ah’m too busy gettin’ oan wi’ mine t’ worry aboot yoors.”

She had a point, Ah’ll gie her that but Ah doubt we wis keepin’ score that night.

Regular readers of my blog will have seen this kind of thing before in my occasional ‘Aggie and Shuggie’ posts which I used as a way of telling people about new reviews. I know a few people struggled with them at first and it’s perfectly understandable. It looks like I’ve forgotten how to spell. The simple fact is that a great amount of care and attention went into the writing of these four stories to ensure that a line was drawn between accuracy and intelligibility. The first thing I had to do was set down some rules for myself. Let’s look at one: the treatment of the digraph ‘th’ which consists of two different phonemes: the voiced dental fricative (as in this) and the voiceless dental fricative (thing). Let me introduce you to three expressions:

• th-debuccalisation (‘’hing’ instead of ‘thing’) – Glasgow
• th-fronting (‘fing’ instead of ‘thing’, ‘bruvva’ instead of ‘brother’, ‘troof’ instead of ‘truth’) – London
• th-stopping (‘dis’ instead of ‘this’, ‘ting’ instead of ‘thing’) – New York

Of course a Jamaican and an Irishman would say ‘dis ting’ too but with completely different accents and it’s impossible to find adequate spellings to convey the subtleties between one city (or even parts of one city) and another; there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet which is why dictionaries include all those funny symbols to tell you how to pronounce things. If you’re not careful what you end up writing becomes unintelligible. Take a simple term like ‘The Beatles’. In many British dialects we have something called t-glottalisation. This would mean that ‘Beatles’ would get pronounced as ‘Bee-uls’ with the tiniest of pauses inserted where the ‘t’ should be and when you think of how many t’s there are in words you start to see just how messy this all could get.

Another thing you have to bear in mind is grammar. In English you would say, “I was going, we were going” but a Glaswegian would say, “We wis goin’” whereas a Yorkshireman would say, “Ah were goin’.”

Of course I use the term ‘Glaswegian’ as if there is such a thing. The fact is that it’s a composite term just as ‘English’ covers a broad range of dialects and accents; they speak English in Birmingham, England and Wellington, New Zealand but the difference is striking. (I knew a Kiwi briefly—she was a temp in our office—and I said to her one day, “Seriously, do you have to try and use every vowel in every word?”) When I set down the rules for Ben, what I was deciding was how he spoke, not how all Scots should speak. The fact is his accent was based originally on a man from Kilmarnock, not Glasgow, but as I’ve not lived out west for many years I decided to stick with what I was more comfortable with. The differences aren’t huge but you’d never catch a Glaswegian saying, “Ah dinnae ken.”

Cockney—or really more Estuary English these days since strictly the term ‘Cockney’ refers to anyone born within "the sound of Bow bells"—is an accent I’m familiar with only from watching TV; it’s the one Americans usually use as their default in sitcoms, the one that sounds like Dick Van Dyke’s ridiculous accent in Mary Poppins. Odd that with a whole country to pick from they’d jump at an area the size of a few city blocks. The Beatles are known the world over but I’ve yet to hear anyone rush to try to replicate the Liverpool accent. When you think of an east end of London accent probably the first person to jump to mind would be Michael Caine, although, and he admits this himself, his accent has been watered down over the years; compare how he speaks to, say, Ray Winstone and you’ll see the difference. Here’s a paragraph from ‘Funny Strange’:

Y’know wot’s wrong wiv the country? Plenty. There’s plenty wrong wiv the country but there’s one fing especially: it’s lost its sense of ’umour. We went frew two world wars an’ we could still laugh at ourselves but not anymore. Oh, I know there’re still stand-up comics out there, people callin’ ’emselves comedians at any rate—fird-rate jokemongers oo should still be workin’ the clubs—but they’re not funny, not proper like. They fink they’re a riot ’cos people laugh at ’em but that ain’t the same. I listen to ’em an’ I pity their audiences ’cos they’re anyfing but. They’re laughin’ at nuffin ’cos there’s nuffin to laugh at. They’ve all forgotten wot funny is.

The thing that distinguished this accent is h-dropping which is why ‘humour’ becomes ‘’umour’ but the fact is that it’d be pronounced more like ‘yoomah’. There are comics up and down the country and this text would’ve worked perfectly with a northern accent (north, as in the north of England) or a Scottish one but when I started writing it I saw him as an east end comic (someone like Tommy Trinder or Sid James (although he was actually born and raised in South Africa)) and so I stuck with it even though the character was based on Tony Hancock who was a Brummie by birth.

The narrator in ‘Monsters’ is something else entirely. In this story I decided to let the omniscient narrator get involved in the storytelling process and to ensure my readers didn’t assume when I used ‘I’ I wasn’t talking about myself I decided to give him a personality and a rather bolshie one too. I imagined him as a New York mobster circa 1930. That, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the story; it’s not set in the past and there are no mobsters but it made sense to me and, remember, that’s the title of this collection and its central theme.

Now, I’ve never been to New York and even if I had things are very different these days accent-wise. Some of it is due to the natural evolution of language—there’s a fascinating article here about that—but others are seemingly going out of their way to deliberately change how they speak:

The online Yellow Pages includes more than a dozen listings for “New York accent reduction” specialists, and searching “New York accent” and reduction or elimination on Google generates about 4,000 hits. The process typically takes at least several months, with as many as three sessions a week, and can cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. – Sam Roberts, ‘Unlearning to Tawk Like a New Yorker’, The New York Times, 19 November 2010

This isn’t a problem. I’ve seen a lot of films and television programs featuring New Yorkers with profound accents. The accent I had in mind, although I’d never heard him speak when I wrote the story, was Steve Van Zandt’s, at least the one he uses in The Sopranos. I met him in a wonderful little show called Lilyhammer in which he plays much the same character as he did in The Sopranos only this time with a lighter touch. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Monsters’:

Now befaw we go too fah down dis road let’s you and me get a few tings straight: I’m yer narratah; my name’s nonna yer goddamn business, but whad I say goes. We ain’t friends. Capeesh? I don’t do dialogue unless I’m in da mood—which, frankly, is rare—and if der’s a plot, well whoopee-fuckin’-do! (And if yer lookin’ faw a subplot... fuggedaboutit.) And as fah as conflict goes… I’ll give ya conflict. I calls it like I sees it. Bein’ da omniscient kinda narratah I’m da only one dat getsta see da bigga picture so if I’m in da moodta share just tank yer lucky stars and pay attention; sit on yer ass, keep schtum and read.

New Yorkese and Glaswegian in particular share something in common. They both contain a high percentage of Slurvian expressions. When the comedian Stanley Baxter recorded his Parliamo Glasgow! sketches in the seventies he regularly used ‘words’ like ‘noohossferra’ or ‘cudgiegoa’ as in ‘now who is for a’ and ‘could you go a’. It was all done for fun but the fact is that Glaswegians do slur their words and so do New Yorkers which is why the text above contains the expression ‘fuggedaboutit’ because it’s become a word in its own right meaning fat chance.

Writing in a dialect is hard. Of all the stories I’ve ever written these four have been redrafted the most. Essentially you’re creating an eye dialect for the page since there is no such thing as a Standard Cockney, Glaswegian or New Yorkese Dictionary to look up. Plenty of writers have had a crack at writing in dialect before me and some are more extreme than others. Here’s a poem by Tom Leonard who I’ve written about before, here.

Good Style

helluva hard tay read theez init
stull
if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then
gawn
get tay fuck ootma road
ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz so ah um
ah no whit ahm dayn
tellnyi
jiss try enny a yir fly patir wi me
stick thi bootnyi good style
so ah wull

I have to admit that the first time I read him, which was in my teens, I wondered what on earth he was on about. He’s reduced language to sounds—there’s hardly a Standard English word in the poem—and yet, if you’re willing to persist it’s actually quite a profound wee piece. The key line is “ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz so ah um” (I’m as good as the lot of you so I am). “Humans speak Language, and all are equal in that fact. The rest is status,” so says Leonard in his review of Language and Power. It’s true. The three dialects I’ve chosen to use are all the vernacular of the common people: Alf Garnett was from the East End of London, his American counterpart Archie Bunker from Queens and I suppose the Scottish equivalent—he’s certainly opinionated enough—would be Rab C Nesbitt from Govan.

No accent is intrinsically good or bad, but it has to be recognized that the way we perceive accents does play a role in our attitude to others. Different people have differing perceptions. So there are significant numbers of young people who see Estuary English as modern, up-front, high on 'street cred' and ideal for image-conscious trendsetters. Others regard it as projecting an approachable, informal and flexible image. Whereas RP, Queen's English, Oxford English and Sloane Ranger English are all increasingly perceived as exclusive and formal. —Paul Coggle, Do you speak Estuary?

These days writing in dialects has gone out of fashion. Readers find it distracting; it slows them down; they frequently have to reread stuff. Often they’ll pack it in and move onto something easier. Books written in dialect can and do sell. Case in point? The Help by Kathryn Stockett in which a Southern-born white author attempts to render black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect. Reviews were mixed and her decision to attempt to write in dialogue questioned but I suspect that was more to do with the fact she was white and she was leaving herself wide open to claims of racism at worst and stereotyping at best.

Here are a few others:

• How late it was, how late by James Kelman: written from the point of view of Sammy, a shoplifting ex-convict in a Glaswegian vernacular stream of consciousness.
• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle: the story is filtered through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy employing the vocabulary and syntax of a child as well as a local dialectical register.
• Londonstani by Gautam Malkani: its narration consisted in a total absorption of a particular kind of street slang that mixed Punjabi with English and Americanisms from MTV and hip hop. The first chapter is called 'Paki' and began with the words: "Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck'd, shudn't be callin me a Paki, innit."
• Foxy-T by Tony White: written in a hybrid mix of Cockney-Carribean-South Asian patios.
• Brixton Rock by Alex Wheatle: written in South London vernacular or 'black English'.
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess: narrated by a violent young gang leader, Alex, in an invented teenage slang which Burgess called Nadsat, and which Alex's doctor described as "odd bits of old rhyming slang … A bit of gypsy talk too. But most of the roots are Slav."
• Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh: written in Edinburgh dialect in short chapters and narrated both by an omniscient narrator and in first-person inner monologues by various heroin users living on the city's inhospitable outer fringes.

I’m not sure anyone’s going to be stalking me for taking the mickey out of New York mobsters and the simple fact is I was aiming at not only a stereotypical accent but a slightly caricatured one; he’s not real. Ben, on the other hand, in ‘Zeitgeist’ and the nameless woman in ‘Disintegration’ are very real and I think their accents humanise them, for me at least. In other stories it could be me talking, there’s so little of the character on the page; these other stories balance that out.

Irvine Welsh, who wrote Trainspotting, said

The classic assumption of such fiction holds true: working-class people speak funny so are in fiction only for the purposes of humour. They do not have an internal life, therefore you traditionally do not have a Renton or a Begbie or a Spud expressing themselves in the narrative of a book.” –   Gerard Seenan, ‘Welsh accuses the middle classes of cultural bias’, The Herald, 30th March 1996

None of my characters are there for comic relief, not even the comedian. There’s humour in every story but there’s humour in every one of these nineteen stories; I like humour. Yes, they may be a bit of a challenge but here’s some advice from a student called Délaissé. She’s talking about how to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

I read the words, and that's a start. I read them out loud in my best Irish accent, and there is one thing I can tell you with certainty: if you want to get into it, do that. Really.

I know some people have tried that with my ‘Aggie and Shuggies’ and it’s helped and the guy who helped me edit ‘Monsters’ (he’s from New York) did that. Reading should be fun. It can be challenging too and, for me, the fun is in meeting the challenge. I see reading a text in an unfamiliar dialect as no different to sitting down and eating a meal in a strange restaurant. The first time I tried Indian and Chinese food it was unusual but now I’m used to them and enjoy them and I would hope readers of my stories come to enjoy them too.

One last Tom Leonard poem to finish with:

. in the beginning was the word .

in thi beginning was thi wurd
in thi beginnin was thi wurd
in thi biginnin was thi wurd
in thi biginnin wuz thi wurd
n thi biginnin wuz thiwurd
nthi biginnin wuzthiwurd
nthibiginnin wuzthiwurd
nthibiginninwuzthiwurd

. in the beginning was the sound .

Here’s a nice wee video where Leonard reads this poem and also talks about high- and low-status languages. He also reads and talks about his famous poem ‘Unrelated Incidents - No.3’, better known as ‘The Six O’clock News’.

Making Sense is available as a paperback from the Fandango Virtual website. An ebook will appear in due course. You can read ‘Zeitgeist’ online here.

You say tomato, I say tomahto. You say stranger, I say outsider.

Beyond a certain point one cannot reconcile the demands of translation and of poetry, and one must opt for one or the other – A.C. Graham, introduction to Poems of the Late T’ang

A while ago I reviewed The Jaguar’s Dream which is a collection of, to put it simply, translations into English of poems from a variety of eras and languages. The poems were translated by the Australian poet John Kinsella who is not a professional translator but tackled the job purely for the pleasure of doing so. In several of his poems I found things I would have done differently. A simple example is his decision in his version of Supervielle’s ‘La Mer Secrète’ to translate ‘Elle est ce que nous sommes’ as ‘It is what we become’. It is not wrong since French has no neuter; something which has always bothered me. Who decided that the sea was female? I wrote about it five years ago in my post French computer sex and have yet to find an answer to the question. Of course in prose I would have been perfectly fine with Kinsella translating elle as ‘it’ but poetry is another ballgame completely. My take on the poem is that Supervielle is using personification here and treating the sea as if she were a woman, which is perfectly feasible, but how would we ever know?

I only studied French for two years at school (and Latin for one). I would have quite liked to have continued my studies but I wanted an O-Level in Music far more. Besides all that was forty years ago. So I am a long way away from what little I did learn but some of it stuck enough to know when the subtitles are wrong on TV. On the whole though I’ve never given the subject of translation much thought over the years. I’ve read books in translation and assumed that as the men and women who were getting paid to do the job they knew what they were doing. Always been a bit naïve me. Since I’ve started doing book reviews though and noticing how some translations get praised over others it has made me curious.

The title of this post refers to the song by George and Ira Gershwin and the novel by Albert Camus. When I read The Outsider in my late teens I assumed that that was the book’s title and it came as a great surprise to me to learn that my American cousins call the selfsame book, The Stranger. The title in French is, of course, L’Étranger which, admittedly, looks like ‘stranger’ but I’m told that there isn’t a equivalent expression in English and that étranger means something between ‘stranger’ and ‘outsider’ whatever that may be. Why, I wonder, did English not simply absorb the word as it has done with so many foreign expressions like vis-à-vis, tête-à-tête and mano-a-mano?

I enjoyed doing research to support my review of The Jaguar’s Dream and thought it might not be such a bad idea to have a crack at translating myself so I typed ‘poésie française moderne’ into Google and picked the first poem that wasn’t too long. It turned out to be an extract from ‘Art poétique’ by Eugène Guillevic of whom I knew nothing. I cut and pasted the poem into a Word document and began. Here is the original and what Google Translate made of it:

Art poétique (extract) Si je fais couler du sable De ma main gauche à ma paume droite, C'est bien sûr pour le plaisir De toucher la pierre devenue poudre, Mais c'est aussi et davantage Pour donner du corps au temps, Pour ainsi sentir le temps Couler, s'écouler Et aussi le faire Revenir en arrière, se renier. En faisant glisser du sable, J'écris un poème contre le temps.

Poetic Art If I pour sand Of my left hand to my right palm, This course is for fun Touching the stone became dust, But that is also and more To give the body time, So feel time Flow, flow And also do Go back, denying oneself. By dragging the sand, I write a poem against time .

Okay we all know that Google Translate is going to mangle the text but for the purpose of a cursory read it does okay; you get the gist. We had a guy pouring sand from one hand into the palm of his other hand. It’s a pleasurable experience and a metaphorical one from all accounts but even just having a quick glance it’s obvious that there is a lot missing here.

The title was the easy bit. Ars Poetica is a Latin term meaning “The Art of Poetry” or “On the Nature of Poetry”.

The first problem I had was determining what the sentences were. On the surface it looks like the first five stanzas make up one long sentence leaving only a short sentence in the final stanza. I suspected that whoever had transcribed the poem had made mistakes. They hadn’t. This is how that opening sentence is translated by Google once all the line breaks are removed:

If I pour sand in my left hand to my right palm, it is of course for the pleasure of touching the stone became dust, but also and more to give body to the time, so feel time flowing , drain and also do go back, denying oneself.

What’s obvious here is that Google Translate treats every line as a sentence and that affects the translation more than one might expect. We see this in line four where the line is translated ‘the course’ whereas the sentence opts for the idiom ‘of course’ which makes all the difference. The same goes for line eight where Couler, s'écouler is translated as ‘Flow, flow’ rather than ‘flowing, drain’. Couler means ‘flow’ or ‘run’ or ‘cast’ or ‘roll’, even ‘smear’. Écouler means ‘sell’ or ‘dispose of’ so ‘drain’ wouldn’t be such a bad translation.

Line six was the first one I struggled with:

Pour	donner	du	corps	au	temps
For / to	give	of / the	body	at the / to the	time

Du is a contraction of the words “of” and “the”. Au is a contraction of the words “at” or “to” and “the”. So is it ‘to give the body time’ or ‘to give [the] body to the time’. That annoying little preposition makes all the difference. In the first instance we’re simple allowing the body time to experience the flow of the sand but in the other suggests a dedication of the body especially since donner can mean ‘donate’. People given themselves to God or they give of themselves to others. It’s the difference between listening to music and giving oneself to the music. Or do we have a situation here like we have with L’Étranger? is Guillevic covering all his bases here, the physical and the, for want of a better word, the spiritual?

I found the fifth stanza particularly troublesome:

Et	aussi	le	faire	revenir	en	arrière	se	renier
And	also	the	do / be	return	in / to	back	to himself	deny

I decided to have a look at some other translations:

nous avons souvent souhaité faire revenir le temps en arrière
we often want to return time back

revenir en arrière pour faire les choses différemment
go back and do things differently

The notion of turning back time is a common one whether we’re talking literally as in The Time Machine or metaphorically. Renier is a verb that means to deny, renounce, disown, repudiate or, more specifically if preceded by se, deny oneself. What is the narrator saying here? If we turn back time then we are denying ourselves what? We have time in the form of grains of sand trapped in our hand. We can metaphorically halt the flow of time whenever we want to.

The last line is easy. It’s practically a transliteration: J'écris un poème contre le temps – I write a poem against time. But the penultimate line made me hesitate again.

En	faisant	glisser	du	sable
In	by	slip	of	sand

Faisant is the present participle of faire. Glisser—think glissando—means to slip, slide or even skid. Context dictates it won’t be ‘skid’ but I was curious why Google Translate threw up ‘dragging’ and I wondered whether or not the poet was suggesting we tighten our fist so that time drags, another common English idiom. In a computer manual they have the expression “Soit en faisant glisser l'appareil sur ce dernier”. Is 'faisant glisser' equivalent to the concept of 'dragging' an item with the mouse? Probably. But do we really drag an icon? I’m thinking back to my Applied Mechanics days and the good old coefficient of friction. We slide things about the screen; we don’t drag them. Sand, however, would provide resistance. Sand has a friction coefficient of 0.60. Or am I getting carried away here? Perhaps.

This is what I settled on:

The Art of Poetry

If I pour sand from my left hand
into the palm of my right hand

the sensation is most pleasant.
Time has turned these stones into dust.

But there’s something else, something more,
which affords me the option to

experience time flow and run
out. Stop. Go back. Deny yourself.

Letting sand slip through my fingers
I write a poem against time.

I decided not to go for a literal translation for the most part but to get under the skin of the poem. At the same time I didn’t want to impose my own (possibly) narrow interpretation:

Every language, Guillevic tells us, is foreign. “Foreign, yes, because words are not made for the use they have in a poem. It’s the work of the poet … to make them say something different from what they would commonly say, by themselves.” – ‘Carnac and Living in Poetry’, James Sallis, Boston Review, October / November 2000

The question begs to be asked: Is it possible to do justice to any author unless you are familiar with more than just the poem you have in front of you? On the Bloodaxe site it says this about Guillevic:

For Guillevic, the purpose of poetry is to arouse the sense of Being. In this poetry of description—where entire landscapes are built up from short, intense texts—language is reduced to its essentials, as words are placed on the page ‘like a dam against time’. When reading these poems, it is as if time is being stopped for man to find himself again.

That, for me, is a significant comment especially when examining a poem about the nature or art of poetry. Since I couldn’t find an English translation of the poem online (although I did run across a Russian one of all things) I decided to order a copy of Ars Poetica and while I was waiting on it arriving in the post did some research to see what I could find out about Guillevic.

Eugène Guillevic (Carnac, Morbihan, France, August 5, 1907, Carnac – March 19, 1997, Paris) was one of the better known French poets of the second half of the 20th century. Professionally, he went under just the single name "Guillevic". – Wikipedia

Wikipedia lists 38 books. Predictably very little has ever been translated into English. I found four: Carnac (1961), Geometries (1967), The Sea & Other Poems (a compilation to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth), Selected Poems of Guillevic and, fortunately for me, Art Poétique (1985-86). Auster’s The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry does, however, include nine poems translated by Savory, John Montague, and Levertov. James Sallis, writing in The Boston Review, doesn’t find this deficiency surprising:

What is at the very heart of his work’s excellence—the simplicity of its diction, the unadorned language, its very modesty—renders it all but untranslatable. Even in French, Guillevic can be an elusive read. Slight, elliptical, gnomic, the poems vanish when looked at straight on. "Les mots / C’est pour savoir," he says. Words are for knowing. And by les mots he means, resolutely, French words. Because their mystery, their magic, is in the language itself, these poems do not easily give up their secrets, or travel well. They are their secrets. They crack open the dull rock of French and find crystal within. In English, all too often, only the dullness, the flatness, remains.

Wikipedia’s brief entry has only this to say about his actual writing:

His poetry is concise, straightforward as rock, rough and generous, but still suggestive. His poetry is also characterized by its rejection of metaphors, in that he prefers comparisons which he considered less misleading.

A poet who eschews metaphors. Interesting. His first book was Requiem which was published rather late, in 1938, by Tschann. He worked in the Ministry of Finance (rising to Inspecteur d'Economie Nationale). His obituary in The Independent says:

This career, with all its legal and administrative rigour, had a decisive effect upon his poetry, enabling him to discard all "poeticality" and "rigmarole rhyming". He became a firm disciple of the Object, and disdained the Surrealists' new-fangled obsession with the Image.

And Sallis again:

Alterity may be Guillevic’s obsessive theme. He is, of course, among the most outward-directed and least subjective of poets, so it’s only inevitable that soon he’d fetch up against the world’s blank face and lack of affect. However stubbornly we confront or make demands upon them, the world and its things remain unknowable. In a poem from his second collection, Exécutoire, he writes: "To see inside walls / Is not given us. / Break them as we will / Still they remain surface." Like the sea.

I said that Guillevic is a French poet and that is true but French was not his first language. In her introduction to Selected Poems of Guillevic the American poet Denise Levertov notes:

It is curious to note that, outside school, Guillevic did not hear French spoken around him, but, in early childhood, Breton, and in adolescence, Alsatian, until he was nearly twenty. Jean Tortel … speculates on the possible influence on his work of this early detachment from the language from which he writes; perhaps, he suggests, it helped to form “the consideration from which he approaches words, the space he leaves between them and himself. For him each vocable (plate, chair, nightingale) is not something to be taken for granted, something everyday.” One might say, indeed, that his relation to words is truly phenomenological…

Levertov is very honest as regards her own efforts:

I am not fully satisfied, by any means, with most of my versions of Guillevic; but A.C. Graham’s definition of the translator’s choices [quoted, in part, at the top of this article] does describe my intention, which has been to render these poems in such a way that they would seem, in English, to be written in the language of poetry and not Translationese.

and even in a tiny poem like this she need to qualify one of her choices:

The little trout
slim¹ as a penknife

can’t find its rock
in the great brook.

     ¹ Literally, “the size of.” (D.L.)

The book arrived quicker than I expected so I’m going to leave this here. I think I may well do a full article on Guillevic at a later date. I was keen, nonetheless, to see what Maureen Smith had made of this extract. Smith lives in France where she was a professor of English and American Literature until she retired in 2002. She is trilingual and her specialism is contemporary poetry. She has written articles in English, French and Spanish on contemporary writers and painters.

Here is her translation of this excerpt:

If I pour some sand
From my left hand to my right palm,

It’s of course for the pleasure
Of touching powdered stone,

But it’s also and more so
To give a body to time,

So as to feel time
Trickling, passing by

And also to make it
Turn back, retract.

By making some sand slip by,
I’m writing a poem against time.

Is her translation right? I never thought of using ‘retract’ nor did I see that he was talking about making time turn back (although I did wonder about it above) but it’s quite obvious here. I’m not sure about her use of ‘some’ in the penultimate line but I see that she’s gone with giving ‘a body to time’ which I wasn’t sure about.

All in all I’m not displeased with my effort. I think I’ve done a little more than translate. I’ve also partly interpreted (i.e. imposed my interpretation) and that could be viewed as a weakness; I know I said above that I tried not to but I don’t think I tried hard enough. I do think Smith’s missed something by simply talking about sand as ‘powdered stone’ though. What is it has turned the stone into powder? Okay, it’s the sea, but it’s the sea over time. After having a think about it I decided to change one line and add in a couple of tweaks. Here is my final (for the moment) version:

If I pour sand from my left hand
into the palm of my right hand

the sensation is most pleasant.
Time has turned these stones into dust

but there’s something else, something more,
which affords me the option to

experience time flow and run
out or stop and turn back the clock.

Letting sand slip through my fingers
I write a poem against time.

I’ve removed the title because now I have the book I can see that the whole book is really one long poem made up of tiny fragments like this.

This has been an enjoyable exercise and I may do it again. I’m certainly glad I discovered this poem and have John Kinsella to thank for that. So I’ll let him have the final say. Here is a link to his poem ‘I read Guillevic's Carnac’.

Pnin

He is not a very nice person but he is fun – Nabokov describing the character of Pnin in a letter to his editor at The New Yorker

Readers of my third novel, The More Things Change, which at the current moment in time comprise a not entirely significant two, my current wife and my only daughter (though not a daughter to my current wife despite the fact she treats her like a second daughter), will recall, if they can cast their minds back to when they first perused the pages of said book which neither will have looked at in several years I have no doubt, my fondness for long, intricate and involved sentences like the one I am in the process of attempting to construct and yet none of the sentences in that book or indeed the sentence you are currently in the process of reading can hold a candle to the ones Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-American novelist, contrived to include in his thirteen novel – and the fourth written in English – Pnin (apparently pronounced ‘P'neen’); I am grateful to Charles Poore of The New York Times for that information since Nabokov himself neglects saying how anywhere in the book and I don’t think I missed it because it is not a book one can rush reading but his closest description is that when spoken (at least by the name’s bearer) the word sounds like a small explosion although personally I might have described as a stifled sneeze but then who am I to correct such a great writer particularly one with such a distinct talent for description, depiction and generally florid writing as is evidenced numerous times throughout this novel?

If, dear reader, my humble efforts with that opening sentence caused you some difficulty then all I can say is that you might want to think twice before picking up a copy of Pnin. On the other hand those of you who enjoyed the journey and managed to resist the urge to obsessively check if I’d punctuated it correctly will probably relish the book; I certainly did. When I described the book to my wife I said, “There isn’t a sentence less than an inch tall.” It’s something of an exaggeration but certainly in the opening chapters Nabokov indulges himself; later on he settles down.

Pnin is an odd book. It’s certainly an odd novel. It didn’t start life as a novel; in fact the first the world got to hear from Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, professor of Russian Literature at Waindell College which the aforementioned Pnin consistently mispronounces as "Vandal College," is in what most readers would have regarded as a short story published in the New Yorker in late 1954; three more ‘stories’ appeared over the next year. The “Pnin novel” as Nabokov himself referred to the book (which at the time he intended to be called My Poor Pnin) wasn’t published, however, until early in 1957 and he struggled to find a publisher, which puzzles me because whether you describe the book as a novel or a collection of sketches or stories doesn’t take away from the exceptional quality of the writing. Doubleday finally published the thing. I think, perhaps, he might have had less trouble had Lolita appeared first. Although written earlier and indeed already in print in France (in 1955 and in English) the first American publication wasn’t until 1958. I’ve read several books by Nabokov – Pale Fire, Transparent Things and Bend Sinister – but not his most (in)famous book although I have, of course, seen Kubrick’s film. Pnin forms the centrepiece of what one might call Nabokov’s American Trilogy comprising Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire all of which feature academics, although a Professor Pnin only appears in the last two. I say a Professor Pnin because the Professor Pnin who appears in Pale Fire, the head of the “bloated Russian Department” at Wordsworth college is given a name check in Pnin and it suggests that these may be separate individuals even if – however unlikely this prospect might seem – they bear the same cognomen.

The book is broken down into seven chapters – they are called ‘chapters’ – each covering a different episode or set of episodes from his life: he gets on the wrong train, has a mishap with his luggage and mixes up notes for the lecture he is travelling to; he rents a room and has his teeth removed; he meets with his ex-wife who persuades him to look after her (but not their) son, Victor; he teaches a college class, visits the library and watches a film; he is visited by Victor who, although polite enough about it, isn’t the slightest bit interested in the football Pnin has bought him as a present which Pnin ends up disposing of “by defenestration” presumably with a good right foot helping it on its way; he spends the summer with fellow émigrés in a Russian community in the country and he hosts a party during which he informs his guests that he is contemplating buying the house he is currently renting – believing that tenure is now within his grasp – only to be told at the end of the evening that he is about to lose his job if he can’t work under an old friend who is joining the staff – which he finds he can’t – and so Pnin packs up and leaves. And that’s the book. In addition to charting these mostly disconnected events – the only thing they really have in common is that they are contained within the chronology of Pnin’s life during 1953 and 1954 – the narrator, who I shall return to in a moment, also fills in quite a bit of Pninian history. Pninian is not my invention, it’s Nabokov’s – he employs it numerous times throughout the book as he does with Pninise and Pninist (once).

The bumbling university professor has been done before: Professor Brainard in the original The Absent-Minded Professor jumps to mind – although that’s not how Nabokov describes Pnin (“It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight.”) – or Professor Julius Kelp in the original The Nutty Professor but there are plenty of others like Professor Calculus from The Adventures of Tintin and Professor Kokintz in The Mouse That Roared. Pnin would best be described, at least if you restricted said description to a single adjective, as eccentric. He is that most beloved of characters, the outsider, and I don’t mean in a Camusian sense; I’m thinking more in a Mork-and-Mindian sense. Pnin arrives from Russia in 1940, the same year as Nabokov himself:

A special danger area in Pnin's case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as 'the rest is silence', 'nevermore', 'week-end', 'who's who', and a few ordinary words like' eat', 'street', 'fountain pen', 'gangster', 'Charleston', 'marginal utility', he had had no English at all at the time he left France for the States. Stubbornly he sat down to the task of learning the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Poe, Edison, and thirty-one Presidents. In 1941, at the end of one year of study, he was proficient enough to use glibly terms like 'wishful thinking' and 'okey-dokey'. By 1942 he was able to interrupt his narration with the phrase, 'To make a long story short'. By the time Truman entered his second term, Pnin could handle practically any topic: but otherwise progress seemed to have stopped despite all his efforts, and by 1950 his English was still full of flaws.

America is a source of wonder to him and he delights in it, in the fact that he has become “an American” which, of course, he both is and will never be. He loves its gadgets and this affection is well expressed in how he takes to his new dentures (although it’s never explained why he felt the need to have his own teeth removed):

There were, as per plan, no lectures, nor did he attend the examinations given for him by Miller. Ten days passed – and suddenly he began to enjoy the new gadget. It was a revelation, it was a sunrise, it was a firm mouthful of efficient, alabastrine, humane America. At night he kept his treasure in a special glass of special fluid where it smiled to itself, pink and pearly, as perfect as some lovely representative of deep-sea flora. The great work on Old Russia, a wonderful dream mixture of folklore, poetry, social history, and petite histoire, which for the last ten years or so he had been fondly planning, now seemed accessible at last, with headaches gone, and this new amphitheatre of translucid plastics implying, as it were, a stage and a performance. When the spring term began his class could not help noticing the sea change, as he sat coquettishly tapping with the rubber end of a pencil upon those even, too even, incisors and canines while some student translated some sentence in old and ruddy Professor Oliver Bradstreet Mann's Elementary Russian (actually written from beginning to end by two frail drudges, John and Olga Krotki, both dead today), such as 'The boy is playing with his nurse and his uncle.' And one evening he waylaid Laurence Clements, who was in the act of scuttling up to his study, and with incoherent exclamations of triumph started to demonstrate the beauty of the thing, the ease with which it could be taken out and put in again, and urged surprised but not unfriendly Laurence to have all his teeth out first thing tomorrow.

'You will be a reformed man like I,' cried Pnin.

Pnin’s love for America is not all it seems though. He seems to want to love America on his terms. When he buys the football for Victor it’s not an American football – a prolate-spheroid-shaped football – but a spherical European soccer ball; he struggles with American humour, its mores and its general exuberance; the one thing he looks for in any dwelling or room he rents is silence:

The sense of living in a discrete building all by himself was to Pnin something singularly delightful and amazingly satisfying to a weary old want of his innermost self, battered and stunned by thirty-five years of homelessness. One of the sweetest things about the place was the silence – angelic, rural, and perfectly secure, thus in blissful contrast to the persistent cacophonies that had surrounded him from six sides in the rented rooms of his former habitations.

Nabokov’s America although accurately described, painstakingly so, in the same way some artists present us with ultra realistic sculptures that look like they might just get up and walk away, it is also a little unreal, a little idealised or perhaps stylised might be a better word.

I mentioned earlier the book’s narrator and I should probably make clear why the identity of the narrator is important. Although he’s a third-party narrator he is not (or at least ought not to be if you’re playing by the rules) omniscient, there are times he gets inside Pnin’s head and I can’t see where he might have chanced upon the information. Pnin is not so obsessively private that he doesn’t share anything with his friends but neither does he share everything. The narrator has known Pnin since Pnin was “a thirteen-year-old gimnazist (classical school pupil)” although Pnin denies any knowledge of that first meeting in his father’s surgery; his father was an optician. The narrator’s memory is quite detailed though:

Do I really remember his crew cut, his puffy pale face, his red ears? Yes, distinctly. I even remember the way he imperceptibly removed his shoulder from under the proud paternal hand, while the proud paternal voice was saying: 'This boy has just got a Five Plus (A +) in the Algebra examination.' From the end of the corridor there came a steady smell of hashed-cabbage pie, and through the open door of the schoolroom I could see a map of Russia on the wall, books on a shelf, a stuffed squirrel, and a toy monoplane with linen wings and a rubber motor. I had a similar one but twice bigger, bought in Biarritz.

We don’t hear much from this narrator but every now and then he does stick his oar into the proceedings like in this section in the book’s first chapter:

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. The sensation poor Pnin experienced was something very like that divestment, that communion. He felt porous and pregnable. He was sweating. He was terrified. A stone bench among the laurels saved him from collapsing on the sidewalk. Was his seizure a heart attack? I doubt it. For the nonce I am his physician, and let me repeat, I doubt it. My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ('a hollow, muscular organ,' according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. Occasionally, when puzzled by his tumbling and tottering pulse, doctors examined him more thoroughly, the cardiograph outlined fabulous mountain ranges and indicated a dozen fatal diseases that excluded one another. He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

So, he is – or may become at some time beyond those being currently related – Pnin’s doctor! Please, reader, don’t take things so literally. What is important to remember is that this narrator is telling his version of events. We cannot completely trust him but then neither can we entirely distrust his retelling of events. Hell, he might even be Pnin himself!

In the section above I mention Pnin’s suspected heart troubles. Evidence of this problem crops up a number of times in the book and we find out that he has in fact had his heart checked. A shame that his heart could not be as easily replaced as his teeth and replaced by another American “gadget.” We learn of his problem when, during his summer break, Pnin meets up with an old friend, Professor Chateau:

Finally, as they walked along a meadow path, brushing against the golden rod, toward the wood where a rocky river ran, they spoke of their healths: Chateau, who looked so jaunty, with one hand in the pocket of his white flannel trousers and his lustring coat rather rakishly opened on a flannel waistcoat, cheerfully said that in the near future he would have to undergo an exploratory operation of the abdomen, and Pnin said, laughing, that every time he was X-rayed, doctors vainly tried to puzzle out what they termed 'a shadow behind the heart'.

'Good title for a bad novel,' remarked Chateau.

If this was anyone else writing you might think that Pnin was a bad novel but Nabokov’s pedigree is such that, as with Beckett, you know – you just know – that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Clearly here Nabokov is poking fun at himself – as Michael Wood points out in his afterword to my Penguin edition, that would have been “too mawkish a title for Pnin” – but he also notes this:

But there are shadows everywhere here, and it is the shadows, finally, rather than the haughty narrator and his hidden story, which remind us that this mournful and funny book is not a collection of sketches; that its very jokes contribute to its completeness, its fusion into an elliptical history of pain.

At first it seems as if this book might disappear under the weight of its own stylistic wit – some of those early sentences I really had to read carefully three times to know where to place my emphases – but Pnin rises out of the narrator’s loquacity and charms his way into existence. He may never quite be the book’s hero but for all he is frequently gently mocked (albeit affectionately by his colleagues and friends) he never completely loses his dignity even when, on holiday, he changes into a pair of Bermuda shorts expressly to play a game of croquet. As it happens he turns out to be the best player there which was unexpected considering the fact that he is something of a klutz the rest of the time.

Among the many tricks that Nabokov plays on us, probably the most puzzling one is in the last chapter where the narrator hijacks the story and Pnin is relegated to a couple of short scenes including his exit from the book. Very strange indeed. Especially when the narrator chases after Pnin’s car because how could that be Pnin chasing after himself but then how could the narrator know what Pnin was thinking unless he was Pnin? Unless Pnin is a fictional character and not a real professor but then that would make the narrator the author, wouldn’t it? Awww you’ll figure it out I’m sure. Or not. Or not care.

Nabokov wrote what would become the first chapter of the novel while he was struggling to complete Lolita partly as a relief from the dark obsessive world of Humbert Humbert – in his own words (in a letter to a friend) as a "brief sunny escape from [Lolita's] intolerable spell" in much the same way as Beckett took a break from his trilogy of novels to write Waiting for Godot (Beckett claimed that he "began to write Godot as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose [he] was writing at the time"[1]) – but it is also not unreasonable to conjecture that Nabokov’s new project was also a kind of insurance against the difficulties that he expected to encounter in trying to publish a novel that meticulously charts the seduction of a twelve-year-old girl by a middle-aged man.

Nabokov did, however, break a cardinal rule when he wrote this book: he based Pnin on a real person:

There have been several suggestions for real-life models, the most plausible being Marc Szeftel, an émigré Russian historian, who was a colleague of Nabokov's at Cornell (which is recognisable as "Waindell College" in Pnin, according to those who know both the actual and the fictional campus). It is certainly significant that Szeftel was Jewish, because it is Pnin's association with his Jewish sweetheart Mira, and his anguish at her tragic fate that dignifies his character more than any other single trait. But there were other things Pnin apparently had in common with Szeftel, such as his imperfect English, which would have seemed less flattering to the putative model.

It is fairly obvious that Pnin was not an instantly recognisable portrait or caricature of Szeftel, for this would have been impossibly embarrassing for both men, who were not only colleagues, but also collaborators on a scholarly project (a study of a medieval Russian epic, The Song of Igor's Campaign) and met socially in private life. There is evidence, however, that Szeftel suspected the character of Pnin was partially based on himself, and somewhat resented the resemblance, without ever explicitly complaining about it.[2]

But it’s not as simple as that. Nabokov also owes a debt to Cervantes:

[O]nly a few months before conceiving Pnin, Nabokov had reread Don Quixote and lectured on Cervantes at Harvard. He had reacted with outrage to Don Quixote’s cruelty, to the book’s implicit invitation to its readers to enjoy Don Quixote’s pain and humiliation. Pnin is Nabokov’s reply to Cervantes. It is no accident that the book’s risible name, that “preposterous little explosion,” almost spells “pain.”[3]

“The history of man,” says Pnin, “is the history of pain.” Pnin is not a fool (and only a very shallow reader will conceive him as such) but he is often fooled and often hurt. A penguin out of water looks funny and is usually at its most vulnerable when waddling about on land.

When it was first published – and the reviews were generally favourable (you can read Charles Poore’s review for The New York Times below) – it did sell, but mainly because of the notoriety that was brewing concerning Lolita which was hard to get in the States and this must have seemed like the next best thing. I wonder how many were disappointed by the complete lack of sex in the book. No doubt a few. I think the most lascivious Pnin ever gets is noticing – I don’t even think he actually admires – “a girl's comely nape” in a library. When Lolita was subsequently published in America in the following year, it went on to sell millions, worldwide, and completely eclipsed poor Pnin in the public consciousness.

As Lodge points out, “a formidable body of commentary and exegesis has by now accumulated around this slim volume,” which is nice and deserved and necessary but far more than I can hope to cover here. If you love language and delight in what can be done with the humble sentence then you should read this book. You will not be disappointed.

One last thought: there are eleven squirrels in the book, now that can’t be a co-incidence, can it?

 

FURTHER READING

---

Charles Poore, ‘Books of the Times’, The New York Times, 7 March 1957

The entire text online.

TV Tropes (don’t let the title fool you but don’t be too sure they’ve got the narrator right either)

Jerome H. Katsell, ‘Pnin: The Perils of Repetition’, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, No.27

Akiko Nakata, ‘Rose and Aquamarine: Liza in Pnin’, The Nabokovian 48, pp.15-19

Priscilla Meyer, ‘Review: Gennadi Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin’, WesScholar

Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szefte

Paul Bruss, Victims: Textual Strategies in Recent American Fiction, chapter 2

Ian Butcher, Radical/Domestic: Representations of the Professor in Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, a thesis

REFERENCES

---

[1] Ruby Cohn, From Desire to Godot, p.138

[2] David Lodge, ‘Exiles in a Small World’, The Guardian, 8 May 2004

[3] Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, pp.271,272 quoted in Stephen Casmier, ‘A Speck of Coal Dust: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin and the Possibility of Translation’, Nabokov Studies, Volume 8, 2004, pp.71-86

Indian Nocturne

I do not know if I exist... it seems possible to me that I might be someone else's dream... I might be a character in a novel, moving through the long waves of someone else's literary style... — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (trans. by Richard Zenith)

Most traditionally published novels come with a recommendation on the cover from as famous an author as the publisher can get their hands on and this book is no different apart from the fact it’s probably the shortest one I can every remember reading as it consists of a single word, from Salman Rushdie, an author not exactly known for his laconism: “beautiful.” I was curious if that was all he had to say and so I did a search and I suspect that the quote comes from this tweet:

The great Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi died today. Read his beautiful, dreamlike Indian Nocturne (Notturno Indiano), translator Tim Parks.

That was on 25 March 2012. Indian Nocturne is not, however, Tabucchi’s final book. It’s actually an old one, his fifth, written in 1984. The book won the French Prix Médicis étranger in 1987 and is, arguably (at least according to the Boston Review), his “most acclaimed work”. About a dozen books are available in English translations that I could see but the only other by him I’d read is Pereira Maintains which I reviewed here back in 2010. I just read through that article and this quote jumped out at me:

His characters, like Pirandello's and Pessoa's, are often endowed with a multitude of personalities and his plots are full of reversals. He is particularly effective both in suggesting a dreamlike atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity and in conveying a message of libertarian commitment. He often presents an intellectual quest, which may take the form of travel to exotic places or purely of a journey in the mind, which allows him to create enigmatic and ephemeral realities. – jrank.org

That last sentence could almost summarise Indian Nocturne in fact. Oddly the book reminded me a little of Ian McEwan’s 1981 novel The Comfort of Strangers in which a couple get lost in Venice—at least it’s Venice in the film—and encounter a strange couple. The protagonist in Indian Nocturne (a writer as it happens) is never lost—he always knows where he is geographically—but then there’s more than one way of being lost. What he has ‘lost’ is his friend Xavier and the plot—I use the term loosely—of the book involves his travels around India looking for him. Of course Xavier isn’t lost—he knows exactly where he is—but does he want to be found? I found the book discomforting and I think that’s why the McEwan jumps to my mind and for no other reason. This is how Tabucchi describes his novella:

Author’s Note

As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the travelling. All the same, given that I too happen to have been through the same places as the protagonist of this story, it seems fitting to supply a brief index of the various locations. I don’t know whether this idea was prompted by the illusion that a topographical inventory, with the force that the real possesses, might throw some light on this Nocturne in which a Shadow is sought; or whether by the irrational conjecture that some lover of unlikely itineraries might one day use it as a guide.

A.T.

On the next page he lists the twelve locations, one for each chapter, that are the various settings of this novella. They range from a bus stop in the back of beyond to a luxury hotel and at each location he encounters an intriguing individual.

An insomnia is an odd description for a book isn’t it? But then he describes The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa as “a delirium” and Requiem as “a hallucination” (yes, ‘a’, not ‘an’). But what about the word ‘nocturne’? The first thing I thought about was music to be honest—Chopin wrote several and Mozart before him wrote a Notturno and a Notturna—but the term dates back to the Middle Ages: the canonical offices consisted of eight daily prayer events and last one, the Night Office—sometimes referred to as Vigils—comprised of a number of sections called 'nocturnes'. Later on the artist Whistler took to using musical terms to describe his painting—e.g. the famous Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl—and the term has come to be applied—retrospectively in some cases—to any painting of a night scene, or night-piece, such as Rembrandt's The Night Watch. The thing is, most of this book doesn’t take place at night and even where it does it isn’t important: a conversation in a hotel room is just a conversation and frankly I’d have to wade through the book to see what the time of day was in each of the chapters because it didn’t register with me as important. Clearly Tabucchi is using the word allegorically or symbolically here. Rushdie called the book “dreamlike” but how can “an insomnia” be dreamlike? I agree totally with him; the book is like a dream, a waking dream, and in that respect I suppose it can be both insomnious and asomatous at the same time. To be fair there is actually a bona fide dream sequence in the eighth chapter so would that be a dream within a dream then or a dream within an insomnia? It gets very confusing. The best I can come up with is that our protagonist is travelling in the darkness of ignorance. I’ll leave it there.

The book opens with our narrator—this is a first person narrative—in a taxi on his way (so he thinks) to the Khajuraho Hotel on Suklaji Street in Bombay; his driver has other ideas:

‘The hotel you mentioned is in a very poor district,’ he said affably, ‘and the goods are very poor quality. Tourists on their first trip to Bombay often end up in the wrong sort of place. I’m taking you to a hotel suitable for a gentleman like yourself.’ He spat out of the window and winked. ‘Where the goods are top quality.’ He gave me a sleazy smile of great complicity, and this I liked even less.

Moments later his passenger has exited from the cab and is making his own way to the the Khajuraho Hotel. Irrespective of his motives—maybe he gets a bung for redirecting customers—the Khajuraho Hotel is exactly what the driver described. The nicest thing the man can think to say about the lobby “if you could call it that” as he enters the place is that it “was merely ambiguous without being sordid;” the hotel’s restaurant menu “promised an infinite variety of dishes but … they were all off. Except for number fifteen.” The variety of prostitutes on offer is slightly better: “from thirteen to fifteen years old, three hundred rupees, over fifty, five rupees.” And that is the reason he is there but whereas he was content to eat the fish and rice dish earlier he’s unwilling to be fobbed off with any piece of tail: “I want a girl called Vimala Sar.” Vilama Sar is also off the menu but he insists and, with the aid of two twenty-dollar bills, she is located and delivered to his room. Not for anything sordid I should add. The girl has written to him about his friend Xavier and so this is the logical place to begin his search for him.

        ‘When he found out I’d written to you he was very angry.’
         ‘And why did you write to me?’
         ‘Because I found your address in Xavier’s diary,’ she said. ‘I knew you were good friends, once.’
         ‘Why was he angry?’
        She put a hand to her mouth as if to stop herself crying. ‘He’d got to be very hard on me those last months,’ she said. ‘He was ill.’
         ‘But what was he doing?’
         ‘He was doing business,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, he didn’t tell me anything, he’d stopped being nice to me.’
         ‘What kind of business?’
         ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, ‘he didn’t tell me anything. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything for days and days, then all of a sudden he’d get restless and flare up in a furious rage.’

She has little else to offer him other than that the people Xavier had been doing business with were in or from Goa, someone was writing to him from the Theosophical Society in Madras and before he disappeared he burned all his writings:

         ‘Xavier had written a great deal,’ she said, ‘then one day he burnt everything. Here in this hotel, he got a copper basin and burnt everything.’
         ‘Why?’ I asked.
         ‘He was ill,’ she said. ‘It was his nature. He had a sad destiny.’

That about summarises the opening chapter. Where to look next? She said Xavier was ill so a hospital maybe. And that’s where we jump to, literally mid-conversation with a doctor (something Tabucchi does in most of the chapters which I suppose is dreamlike but it’s also a bit jarring, suddenly shifting from one location to another and into the midst of the action); we’re now having a brief tour of the Breach Candy Hospital. Xavier’s not there; that would be too easy. From there he moves to a better class of hotel—on the recommendation of the doctor—the Taj Mahal Inter-Continental Hotel, still in Bombay. The next day we witness a conversation between him and a Jain, a follower of Jainism, an Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings; it is one of the oldest religions of the world. This takes place in the Railway Retiring Rooms in which one can have the use of a bed as long as one is in possession of a valid railway ticket. On to Madras where he has a strange encounter with the former occupant of his hotel room that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his quest for Xavier but everything’s not about that. A meeting with the Theosophical Society was on the cards and although the conversation dwells on Hesse and Pessoa I was not entirely convinced that the ghost of Kafka wasn’t lurking in the shadows there too.

We’re now up to chapter seven, the bus to Goa where one of the book’s two (for me) most fascinating encounters takes place at the waiting room adjacent to the bus-stop on the Madras-Mangalore road about fifty kilometres from Mangalore; the place has no name. There he encounters one traveller who catches his eye:

Sitting on the bench at the far end was a boy of about ten with short trousers and sandals. He had a monkey with him, hanging onto his shoulders, its head hidden in his hair and its little hands clasped together round the neck of its master in an attitude of affection and fear. […] I thought it strange, this boy alone in this place with his monkey, even if it is common to see children alone with animals in India; and immediately I thought of a child who was dear to me, and of his way of cuddling a teddy-bear before going to sleep. Perhaps it was that association that led me toward the boy and I sat down next to him. […] [O]nly then did I realise with a sense of horror that the tiny creature he was carrying on his shoulder was not a monkey but a human being.

[…]

The boy stroked the hands clinging together over his chest. ‘He’s my brother,’ he said affectionately, ‘he’s twenty.’ Then assuming an expression of pride … he said: ‘But he knows the Scriptures, he knows them off by heart, he’s very intelligent.’

The “monster” we learn as the conversation progresses is an Arihant, a Jain prophet.

        ‘He reads the karma of the pilgrims, we make a lot of money.’
        ‘So he’s a fortune-teller.’
        ‘Yes,’ said the boy innocently.

The man agrees to have his fortune told. The result is unexpected:

        ‘So,’ I asked, ‘can I hear it?’
        ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘my brother says it isn’t possible, you are someone else.’
        ‘Oh, really,’ I said, ‘who am I?’

Most of us know about karma—we equate it with destiny—but what about maya and atma? They were new to me. The Ātman is a philosophical term used within Jainism to identify the soul. The boy describes maya as “the outward appearance of the world … but’s it’s only an illusion, what counts is the atma.’ Needless to say the man wants to know where his atma is and, after a little pressing (and an additional ten rupees), the brother tells him, “He says you are on a boat.” After that the head is buried again and it’s clear the audience is over.

The second (for me) most fascinating encounter is in the final chapter which I’m saying nothing about other than to say if you’re a fan of metafictive writing (as I am) you will enjoy it. And, no, is doesn’t take place on a boat. Not sure a boat’s ever mentioned again actually.

So what and/or who is our narrator searching for in India? In an interview Tabucchi said:

Tabucchi: I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions. The more doubts they have the better. People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic—they aren't robots. I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia. I don't go for people who lead full and satisfying lives. In my books, I'm not on the side of the authorities. I'm with those who've suffered. My first novel, Piazza d'Italia, was an attempt to write history that hasn't been written, history as written by the losing side, in this case the Tuscan anarchists. My books are about losers, about people who've lost their way and are engaged in a search.

Lopez: What are they looking for?

Tabucchi: They're looking for themselves through others, because I think that's the best way to look for oneself. The main character in Indian Nocturne, who retraces the steps of a friend who's disappeared in India, is involved in such a quest. And so is Spino, the character in The Edge of the Horizon who tries to find out the identity of an unknown corpse. I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves. – Asbel Lopez, ‘Antonio Tabucchi: A Committed Doubter’ UNESCO Courier, November 1999

In a review back in 1989 when the first English edition appeared Amy Edith Johnson, writing in The New York Times had this to say:

Christine, a traveling acquaintance who makes her living “photographing wretchedness,” urges the narrator, over dinner: “Tell me about your novel, come on. . . . I'm intrigued, don't keep me in suspense.” “But it's not a novel . . . it's a bit here and a bit there, there's not even a real story, just fragments of a story. And then I'm not writing it, I said let's suppose that I'm writing it.” Clearly we were both terribly hungry.'' You will be, too, minutes after swallowing Indian Nocturne. – Amy Edith Johnson, ‘In Short: Fiction’, The New York Times, 16 July 1989

Okay, at 135 pages Indian Nocturne is not a feast, no, but it’s the difference between nouvelle cuisine and a Lancashire hotpot. This isn’t a book that will fill you up. This is a book to savour. I didn’t come away from it satisfied. I still have questions. I want to go back and read it all over again to see what I missed. I don’t see this as bad writing; far from it. It’s also not perfect writing—and I don’t just mean the lack of semicolons—but perfection is not open to interpretation.

Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because when I’m given a shirt that’s too clean, one that’s completely white, I immediately start having doubts. It’s the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection. Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas. – Antonio Tabucchi, from a 1999 interview

Why India though? Could this have taken place in, say, Venice? Yes, perhaps, but India is evocative of so much more. Carl Jung wrote an essay in 1939: ‘The Dreamlike World of India’. Is there any better place in the world to stand in for a dream landscape than India? Western sensibilities crumble as soon as you step off the plane. I suppose this story could’ve been told in Japan—I’m thinking Lost in Translation here which explores similar themes of loneliness, insomnia, existential ennui, and culture shock—but India is just perfect. The book has been filmed—a French version exists, Nocturne indien—and I was interested to see that they cast the same actor as Rossignol and Xavier. Odd choice of name for the lead especially as, towards the end of the book, he says, “I’m called Roux,” so it’s not right to say the narrator is nameless (assuming Roux is his real name) but the filmmaker’s choice is still an interesting one. Are Roux and Xavier the same person? And why was Shadow written with a capital letter in the author’s note? That’s very Jungian. I’m not sure how Roux and Xavier were rendered in the original Italian but I can’t help but notice that Roux begins with an ‘r’ and ends in an ‘x’ whereas Xavier begins with an ‘x’ and ends in an ‘r’. Or am I stretching? The shadow of doubt is unavoidable.

I thought this was a lovely book and I’d have absolutely no problems reading this guy again.