"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (Jorge Luis Borges)

from Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby, story translated by James E. Irby (New Directions, 1964 augmented edition)


My interest in Borges I pick up from the interest in Borges of my favorite contemporary writers. Roberto Bolaño, in an interview, called him “the center of the Latin American canon.” Borges animates most of Bolaño’s writings, notably in Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666 (two books I’ve been recently rereading) where Borges’s literary patterns are evident. His influence also makes his way into The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, through references to The Book of Imaginary Beings and the story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I was also surprised to find Borges name-checked by Murakami Haruki (not my favorite writer yet) in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

So when I got wind of a weekly reading of three stories of our Argentine writer in Richard’s great blog, Caravana de Recuerdos, I couldn’t let pass the chance. Besides, I have Labyrinths languishing for more than a year now.

This week’s story is the much-anthologized, much-celebrated story of Pierre Menard and how he came to “rewrite” chapters of the epic Don Quixote. I do think that my appreciation of this story will be enhanced by a reading of the epic, but I don’t think I can cram the tome in the span of a few days, unless I get the unrealistic idea from Menard that a reading of a book consists of the “will” to reproduce its ghost in the realm of imagination-illusion-delusion. But Menard does more than will it, he actually suffered for it.

The story starts with a kind of catalog of Menard’s “visible” literary outputs, before turning to the other “unfinished” work—“the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless.” Reading as a form of writing is what I see the story is about. That the readers write their own version of the story as they go along. Menard has this dream of replicating sections of the Quixote verbatim, and so he willed himself to this endeavor and, from the convenient point of view of the fanboy-narrator, Menard succeeded. Does this mean that everyone who reads the Quixote can be a Pierre Menard, just like everyone who reads “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” can be a Jorge Luis Borges? Perhaps we’ll know only if the real Pierre Menard stand up. But what if I say that I can match Borges’s story word for word? :)

If I can borrow Gregory Rabassa’s idea (in his memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents) that a good translation is essentially a good reading, then another reading of this story pertains not only to the “reading” of a book, but to “translating” it:

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

Is that not the same as saying that Menard may be (just may be) translating the Quixote? If so, Borges may really be ahead of his time, as is often declared. When he published the story, there are already several versions of the epic in the English language alone. With the latest developments in Cervantes scholarship, the years saw the appearance of multiple translations of the Spanish novel by, among others, Samuel Putnam and Burton Raffel, and in the past decade alone, by John Rutherford, Edith Grossman, and Tom Lathrop. Do these translators, by their close readings of the text, form a band of Pierre Menards themselves? Do we not regard them as “co-creators” of the Quixote, if not literally (word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence translation) then contextually (context-by-context) through their interpretation of the epic’s Spanish into their own language, the coinciding of one language into another? In the same way that there are always individual (unique) readings of a book from different readers, then the individual efforts of the translators create a new book that is the same book and also not the same book. The only difference with Menard is that they have something, a concrete product, to show for it: the published translations. Menard apparently destroyed the manuscript of his “translation” in a bonfire.

There is no definitive reading; there is no definitive translation. Individual readings will not arrive at the same feeling, the feeling of completeness or incompleteness, of closure or open-endedness. Every reading is a new reading, just as there is no definitive writing. The author himself, Cervantes himself, does not fully know his own work because it created for itself a life of its own the moment he put down pen and paper, and the moment the presses printed the pages and bound the epic between the spine and covers. Writing may have given breath to books, but it is reading through the ages that gives life to books through the ages. That enables for it to survive oblivion, become a classic. The narrator of Borges’s Menard did the reverse: he elevated a translated version of a classic that only exists in oblivion, or in any case, that is consigned to it.

The Rings of Saturn: Silk

X


The final chapter of The Rings of Saturn began with our narrator describing the various subjects that Sir Thomas Browne wrote about in his papers. They included the "Musæum Clausum," a catalog of curiosities that were likely products of Browne’s imagination. Sebald proceeded to itemize some of the objects mentioned in this "register of marvels." The last item he mentioned was a bamboo cane containing silkworm eggs that two Persian friars smuggled from China during the reign of Emperor Justinianus in Byzantium.

From this moment on, Sebald began to describe the science of sericulture: the anatomical and biological traits of Bombyx mori, the species of moth responsible for spinning the fine silk thread; the white mulberry tree that harbors the silkworm; the propagation of silkworms and the art of silk-making in China during the time of Emperor Huang Ti; the spread of silkworm culture from Greece, the Aegean islands, Sicily, Naples, Piedmont, Savoy, and Lombardy. It later spread to France through the initiative of Olivier de Serres who became the counsellor of Henry IV.

Sully, Henry IV’s prime minister, saw a competition in ascendancy from de Serres, so he opposed the idea of silk worm cultivation in France and published his arguments in his memoirs of 1788, a volume of which was acquired by Sebald at an auction. Sully’s objections were ignored and silk cultivation progressed in France, in part because of the Edict of Nantes (1598), which promoted tolerance of Huguenots, the people mainly responsible for the cultivation of silkworms.

England copied France’s example. James I began to establish the rearing of silkworms by planting mulberry trees in Buckingham Palace. The silkworm industry in England reached it peak following Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Huguenots fled France and settled in England to continue their work on silk-making. Sebald reflected on how silk weavers, with their backbreaking work over the complex patterns they create, resembled scholars and writers in that they are all prone to melancholy and the evils associated with it. He also observed that, notwithstanding the despair and mental illnesses of the weavers, the beauty and variety of materials that they produce were truly incredible, "like the plumage of birds."

The Germans also attempted their hand at silk husbandry. By 1822, however, Seybolt(!) – a master dyer and employed as "Keeper of the Silkworms and Superintendent of Carding and Filature") – told the Director of the Royal Gardens that in spite of the thousands of mulberry trees planted, only two survived, the reason being the "despotic manner in which German rulers attempted to force [silk cultivation] along." The compulsory measures and stiff penalties of the silk laws were eventually revoked upon the death of the duke of Bavaria, Karl Theodor.

In 1811, silkworm cultivation in the German borders also failed due to environmental conditions. Despite this discouraging state of the industry, the Bavarian Counsellor of State Joseph von Hazzi campaigned for the continuation of sericulture. In his book (1826) he emphasized the lessons learned from past mistakes, the inculcation of "virtues of order and cleanliness" to the lower classes by way of silk cultivation, and thus the imperative to continue sericulture as the thing that would eventually lead to the "moral transformation of the nation."

It will be one hundred years more before German fascists put into effect Hazzi’s vision. Sebald knew this from a film on German silk industry: "In contrast to the dark, almost midnight tonalities of the herring [fisheries] film, the film on sericulture was of a truly dazzling brightness. Men and women in white coats, in whitewashed rooms flooded with light, were busy at snow-white spinning frames, snow-white sheets of paper, snow-white protective gauze, snow-white cocoons and snow-white canvas mailing sacks. The whole film promised the best and cleanest of all possible worlds." According to a pamphlet on the film, Hitler announced at a party rally that the nation must strive for self-sufficiency in all material aspects. Thus, silk cultivation was taken as a matter of policy for economic reasons and also to usher in the "dawning era of aerial warfare."

The pamphlet further contained several strategies to involve young students with silk cultivation. It outlined the steps involved in planting mulberry trees and the rearing of silkworms. According to the pamphlet: The silkworms "could be used to illustrate the structure and distinctive features of insect anatomy, insect domestication, retrogressive mutations, and essential measures … to monitor productivity and selection, including extermination to pre-empt racial degeneration."

The film demonstrated the systematic hatching and feeding of caterpillars, the cleaning of frames, the spinning of silk, and lastly the killing by suspending cocoons over boiling cauldron: "The cocoons, spread out in shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is complete."

The book ended on Maundy Thursday, April 13, 1995, with Sebald contemplating the events that coincided on that day from previous years. It was the day, for example, that the Edict of Nantes was approved by Henry IV, 397 years ago. On the same day, 253 years ago, was the first performance of Handel’s Messiah. It was also the very same day that the father of Clara, Sebald’s companion, died in hospital. It occurred to him that black silk was previously worn by the upper classes to mourn for the dead. And there was once a practice in Holland, according to Sir Thomas Browne, of draping black ribbons over mirrors and canvases to enable the soul to travel peacefully on its final journey.

The Rings of Saturn: Very the last stop

In the penultimate chapter of The Rings of Saturn, our traveller is at the last stop of his journey.

IX

After Orford, Sebald travelled by bus to Yoxford and then walked along a Roman road until he arrived at Chestnut Tree Farm. This is the residence of Thomas Abrams, a farmer and lay preacher who had been working for twenty years on a scale model of the Temple of Jerusalem. Abrams became obsessed with recreating a Jerusalem as it had looked at the beginning of time. His endless work on the replica, which was nowhere near completion, was later acknowledged when he received visitors from all over the world, including historians, archaeologists, religious men, and even Lord Rothschild. This acknowledgement assuaged his neighbor’s, and even his own family’s doubts, about the sanity of his mind since he became immersed in his work. After their conversation Abrams drove Sebald to his next destination, Harleston, where he stayed in Saracen’s Head.

In the morning Sebald walked from Saracen’s Head to some hamlets in 'The Saints' – so-called because they were named after patron saints of churches. He arrived at a cemetery of the parish church of Ilketshall St Margaret, where in the Middle Ages a certain Reverend Ives was vicar living with his wife and daughter in Bungay. In 1795 they were visited daily by an exiled French nobleman, the Vicomte François-René Chateaubriand. The Vicomte became the tutor of the daughter, Charlotte. (The narrative Sebald was recounting at this point mostly came from the memoirs of Chateaubriand, which he began writing in 1807.) Charlotte became very close to Chateaubriand so much so that during his farewell dinner with the family, the mother asked him to marry Charlotte. It turned out that Chateaubriand was already married and so cannot accept the offer. He left the house immediately.

Twenty-seven years later, when Chateaubriand was now ambassador of the French king, he was visited by one Lady Sutton, accompanied by her two sons. This was actually Charlotte Ives, who married Admiral Sutton three years after Chateaubriand left her. After this encounter, Chateaubriand visited her in Kensington four times; during his last visit Charlotte asked her to put in a good word with the Governor-General of India, for her elder son who planned to serve in Bombay.

After Charlotte left, Chateaubriand relived and wrote about their "unhappy story," questioning himself whether in writing he would not again betray and lose Charlotte. But no, for him writing is the only way he can cope with the overwhelming memories that beset him. Later he asked in his memoir: "What would we be without memory?"

At this point, Sebald shared several events in Chateaubriand’s life: momentous wars and conflicts, military spectacles, "the highlights of history which staggers blindly from one disaster to the next," his death in 1848, his childhood in Combourg, and the day he left his family at age 17 to strike into the world.

Sebald’s walk took him to Ditchingham Lodge where Charlotte Sutton lived with her husband. From there he went to the last stop of his travels, to the Ditchingham churchyard where Charlotte’s elder son, the one who went to Bombay, is buried. Beside his tomb is another monument of heavy stone which had an urn on top of it and had several air-holes on the upper edges. Sebald presumed that the woman buried on it was an acquaintance of Charlotte Sutton.

Sebald then went to the Mermaid in Hedenham to phone and wait for Clara (Sebald’s wife?) who will pick him up and drive him home. Contemplating the surrounding Ditchingham Park, Sebald assumed that it must have been built at the time Chateaubriand was in Suffolk. (Sebald noted that the building of park landscapes in England must sometimes have led to class conflicts owing to the displacement of entire villages at the pleasure of the ruling elite.) Chateaubriand himself undertook the planting of trees in a summer house he brought in 1807. Sebald’s identification with Chateaubriand is evident from a reproduction of his photograph where he posed under a large Lebanese cedar, more like demonstrating Chateaubriand's close affinity to trees.

Much like in the collapse of herring fisheries, Sebald enumerated several causes of decline in the population of trees in England beginning in the mid-1970s. These include the spread of Dutch elm disease, mutations, old age, and long droughts. The devastation culminated in the autumn of 1987 when a powerful hurricane landed and felled 14 million mature hard-leaf trees, turning literally everything "upside down."

"Los Neochilenos" (Roberto Bolaño)

“Los Neochilenos” (“The Neochileans”) is the second of three poems in Tres. Tres is Roberto Bolaño’s second collection of poetry in Spanish and what he considered to be one of his two best books, that is to say his best writing. It will be brought to English soon in a translation by Laura Healy, who also did The Romantic Dogs.


We also know that Erica Mena had completed her English version of the entire Tres sequence. (An excerpt of the first poem in Tres, “Tales of the Autumn in Gerona”, was published last month in Words Without Borders.) However, according to Erica herself, she wasn’t allowed to bring out her version in book form. This elicited strong reactions from critics.


Published in the latest issue (Issue 25 - Winter/Spring 2010) of the literary journal Washington Square was perhaps another translation of this poem. The translation was by Mariela Griffor. Maybe this is again only an excerpt as it was titled "de los Neochilenos" in the archive.


Back in 2008, the magazine n+1 also published "Los Neochilenos" (issue no. 7: Correction). The translator was not credited online and only a very short fragment of the poem was available online. I’m not sure if the magazine published the whole poem. (EDIT: They did publish it in full. But the full-text poem is one of the most highly valued pieces of the magazine. It would cost some $75,000 for it to appear online.) Here is the fragment:

Los Neochilenos [excerpt]
by Roberto Bolaño

And the only thing
Truly pleasant
That we saw in Arica
Was the sun of Arica:
A sun like a cloud of
Dust.
A sun like sand
Subtly displacing
The motionless air.
The rest: routine.
Killers and converts
Mixed in the same discussion
Of deaf-mutes,
Of idiots undone
By purgatory.
And the lawyer Vivanco
A friend of Don Luis Sanchez
Asked what kind of crap we were trying to pull
With this Neochilenos bullshit.

So there may be 3 or 4 English translations of this poem alone while there are two extant versions (by Healy and Mena) of the entire book Tres. Only one English Tres, however, was authorized to come out. Which is a pity. I think the more translations available of a single work, the more exciting the situation will be for readers who are only able to access the works of a writer in translation.


Multiple translations will sharpen our perception of how literature sounded in the original. I find it exciting to compare several versions of a single work. Right now I’m reading side by side two translations of Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki – Jay Rubin’s authorized version (2000) and Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation (1989) for Kodansha – and enjoying both versions so far. A few months ago, I’ve finished Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal, in a supple translation by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin. I first encountered it in the spare version of Leon Ma. Guerrero. I wouldn’t mind rereading it again in the first translation (in a supposedly baroque style) done at the turn of 20th century by Charles Derbyshire and in the latest rendering by Harold Augenbraum. Of course, I also won't let pass Lacson-Locsin's rendition of El Filibusterismo, the sequel to Rizal’s book (my favorite of the two based on my readings of Ma. Guerrero). Reading multiple translations is a great way to increase understanding of the work of fantastic writers one would not have any other way to read.


In an interview, translator par excellence Edith Grossman was asked a hypothetical question: Assuming that a reader or reviewer is trying to choose between two translations of a book, how can she judge which of the two is the better? Grossman’s reply was instructive:

In a way it’s like asking, how do you choose between two pianists who perform a Beethoven sonata? Well, maybe you listen to both. The fact that you like one doesn’t mean the other is inadequate. In the case of a book that’s been translated more than once, if you have several translations, how terrific for you. That means you have a very, very broad range of interpretation.

I find Erica’s excerpt in Words Without Borders to be a revelation. It's a side of Bolaño the poet I haven't encountered before. It is disappointing that her complete version of Tres is not to be allowed to see print. As what I’ve said before, I’d like Laura Healy and Erica Mena to bring out their separate interpretations of this trilogy of poems so that we will have a chance to experience two unique readings of it. Certainly not to decide which version is superior but to detect correspondences and deviations between the two translations which is a way for us readers to closely read a poem or, in Grossman’s terms, to listen to a performance of a great symphony. This poetry collection is what Bolaño personally considered one of his best works. Maybe we owe it to him that we must make an attempt to listen to his lines and learn his art as it was created before our very own eyes, in as many interpretations as the concert hall can produce.

The Rings of Saturn: Heart of darkness

I am interested in the way Sebald appropriated certain non-fictional devices, such as memoir, travel writing, essay, and biography (of Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad, in chapter V alone) into a work of fiction. This blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction is a constant in Sebald’s writings and even the photographs he included seem to validate or "authenticate" his text. I recently came across an interview with Eliot Weinberger, who translated works by Borges, among others. In the interview he said something about "authenticity" as an academic invention.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:


"… it’s hard to draw the line these days between the academy and actual artists. In the academy, identity politics has replaced any kind of politics known to the rest of the world. So they’ve invented this idea of authenticity: that one can only talk about where one is personally coming from, and only the people coming from a culture are able to talk with any authority about that culture at all. This strikes me as totally deadening in terms of imaginative literature, and also utterly unrealistic …"

"There had been that big anthology of witness poetry, and the idea that you had to actually have been in World War II to write about World War II. This whole question of authenticity, which is a denial of the imagination. I mean, Dante didn’t go to Hell."

"… all memoir writing is ultimately fictional anyway. So then it becomes a question of: Are you creating an entirely fictional persona, who you claim to be yourself? And … are you marketing yourself as such?"


I think the effectiveness of Sebald’s fiction is due in part to his authentic engagement to the subjects he explores. This may have something autobiographical about it. Although The Rings of Saturn appears deeply personal in a lot of places, Sebald chose to label it as fiction and used certain elements of his research in a fictional (imaginative) way. Even if he talks about past events (the anatomy lesson, air wars, naval wars, ethnic cleansing in WWII, slavery and imperialism in the Congo in the 19th century), it is as if he was an actual witness or observer to said events. I find Sebald’s sensitivity to these 'forgotten' topics to be a very humane and sympathetic one. His excavation of memories seems to me like an inquiry on and a critique of human nature, particularly the human capacity for destruction. The Rings may be 'fiction' in terms of the literary devices he put into it but it doesn’t ring false to me.