Todas las almas

Notes on The Pole: A Novel by J.M. Coetzee (Liveright, 2023)

1. "The decision to invite the Pole ... is arrived at only after some soul-searching." The Pole then is the soul being searched for. And reading The Pole by J.M. Coetzee is an attempt to find the soul in a human being. 

2. If our searchee is Witold, the Pole, our searcher is Beatriz, a board member of a concert organizer in Barcelona. "Dante", the poet, is mentioned 21 times in the novel.

3. For those not into Chopin, Forest of Piano might be a good crash course into the master.

4. Spanish phrases are led astray into the novel. I was half expecting Jesus (or David) to make an appearance. El Polaco first appeared in Spanish translation a year before the original.

5. "Enough to quench whatever spark there is in the soul." The blog's title is a tip of the hat to the late Javier Marías, not least because the novel is partly set in Barcelona. Coetzee was given by the Spaniard the honorary title of Duque de Deshonra, in 2001, for the inaugural Reino de Redonda Prize. Learning of the award:

Professor Coetzee replied, from the University of Cape Town (he now lives in Australia), with a most polite note of thanks, and chose to call himself "Duke of Dishonra" [sic] in Redonda. "Although I am conscious," he wrote, "of both the denotation and the connotations of the Spanish word 'dishonor,' and unless you consider that I am thereby treating the company of Dukes too lightly, I will adhere to that title, which seems to me suitably quixotic." [Google Translate]

6. The word "soul" or "souls" (including words appended with "soul") appears 21 times in The Pole: seven times in the first chapter, 10 times in the penultimate chapter. The novel consists of six chapters and 167 pages in Kindle.

7. The word "feel" (including "feels", "feeling", "feelings", and felt") appeared 30 times.

8. "Happy" (including "unhappy" and "happiness") occurs 18 times. "Music" (and "musical" and "musician"), 40. "Life" and "live" (plus associated words), 82. "Language/s", 12. "Word/s", 41.

9. Witold Walczykiewicz, the Pole pianist, is being confused with Max von Sydow. The novelist Coetzee has finally admitted the resemblance.

10. 

He certainly does not have a big stomach. He is even a bit—she reaches for a word she does not often have a need for—cadavérico, cadaverous. A man like that should bequeath his body to a medical school. They would appreciate having such big bones to practise their skills on.

The black humor in that passage is simply vampiric. Language is a conscious mannerism in the Coetzee universe. An inner translation exists. The Spanish thought, rendered in English, befits the novel's first appearance in Spanish. Novel writing is such a suitably quixotic exercise for Coetzee.

11. As of today, December 26, 2024, 112 other people highlighted this part of the book, according to Kindle:

‘Why is he important? Because he tells us about ourselves. About our desires. Which are sometimes not clear to us. That is my opinion. Which are sometimes desires for that which we cannot have. That which is beyond us.’

 

12.

It is not Chopin who fails to speak to me, Witold, but your Chopin, the Chopin who uses you as his medium—that is what she would say. Claudio Arrau—you know him?—she would go on—Arrau remains, for me, a better interpreter, a better medium. Through Arrau, Chopin speaks to my heart. But of course Arrau was not from Poland, so perhaps there was something he was deaf to, some feature of the mystery of Chopin that foreigners will never understand.

 

Is a Polish pianist the best interpreter we'll ever have of Chopin? Is it because the native pianist breathed the same air and lived in the same landscape as the Pole's, nuances that the foreign interpreter will never be able to incorporate in his repertoire? Such a nativist perspective will forever preclude a foreign genius from being acknowledged.

 

13. 

She writes a second email. ‘Why are you here, Witold? Please be frank with me. I have no time for pretty lies. Beatriz.’ 

 

She deletes I have no time for pretty lies and sends the message. It is not just lies that she has no time for, but also circumlocutions, word games, veiled meanings.

 

A Coetzee novel is a word game. A Freudian slip unmasks the foreign speaker. Lies can be pretty too. Lindas mentiras.

14. "Heart" words, including "heartache" and "heartless", are mentioned 28 times in the novel. "Peace" is used 23 times. "Love", as well as other words with "love" as a root word or as half of compound word (e.g., "lovemaking"), appears 86 times. "Sexy", "sex", and "sexual", 10.

15. The inability to access a language is a tragic barrier to communication. Beatriz had the poems from her lover Witold translated from Polish to Spanish by a translator.

 

The shame is that Clara Weisz, who is no one to her and no one to Witold, has had access to what was going on in Witold’s soul, clearer access than she, for whom the poems were written, will ever have, given that there must be tones, echoes, nuances, subtleties in the Polish that no translation can ever transmit.

 

16.  What was left for Beatriz to interpret—a sheaf of translated pages—was only second-hand Witold, not the essence of her Polish lover. No translation can ever transmit the soul of the original. 

 

17. Not a word of "Quixote" or "quixotic" appears in the novel. 

 

18. Neither does the name "Jesus" appear. Yet the phrase "I am who I am!" appears once.

 

19. "Spanish", meaning the language, or native speaker, or as an adjective, appears 15 times.

20. "Mean" (not the adjective), "meanings", etc., 35 times.