August 2007

Kleist's Findling 8-2-07

Er rief die ganze Schar der Teufel herbei, ihn zu holen, verschwor sich, sein einziger Wunsch sei, gerichtet und verdammt zu werden, und versicherte, er würde noch dem ersten, besten Priester an den Hals kommen, um des Nicolo in der Hölle wieder habhaft zu werden! – Als man dem Papst dies meldete, befahl er, ihn ohne Absolution hinzurichten; kein Priester begleitete ihn, man knüpfte ihn, ganz in der Stille, auf dem Platz del popolo auf.

—Kleist, Heinrich von. "Der Findling." Projeckt Gutenberg. Der Spiegel. (Link on Other sites to see page.)

How could I have missed this ending? Wanting to be damned to be able to wreak revenge in Hell should be memorable. Somehow the professor I had when I read this long ago focused in on a detail of Nicolo cracking nuts with his teeth and this is what stayed with me all these years. If nothing else, reading through these stories again has proven to me what influence teachers/instructors/professors have over the reading and understanding of a story. Maybe at the time I was puzzled by the nut-cracking-focus and that is why it stuck with me so much. Perhaps without realizing it, my mind continues to grind away unconsciously at things I don't understand, hoping to find enlightenment, just like the time I heard a dirty joke which confused me when I was a kid and it came rushing back once I finally knew enough to understand it. Years it must have sat back there simmering until all the "comedic" pieces fit together. (I have to admit, there is still one more that I haven't figured out yet, but I remember there were adults who didn't understand that one either when I heard it, so it may remain forever opaque to me.) And so I am confronted with one of the first stories of Kleist that I ever read, remembering the majority of the story, but having totally forgotten the ending in favor of some nut-cracking scene.

Let me give a little credit to the nut-cracking. Kleist's stories are compact and dense, so this detail has to be important. Nuts can be symbolic of fertility, since they are seeds. The duality of eating nuts makes this moment hard to read for foreshadowing: do you destroy fruitfulness by eating them or do you gain fruitfulness by eating them? If Piachi had read this moment right, would he have thrown the little boy off the cart, thereby keeping all evil away from himself? Although this is an interesting detail, I hope we do not become suspicious of all who like an almond every once in a while.

I have the feeling, though, that once again, the focus of the discussion (as with a different instructor teaching Das Bettelweib von Locarno) somehow got mired down in a detail that adds to, but does not really determine, the meaning of the story. It is relatively easy to latch onto a key to meaning, and in doing so, see only the trees and not the forest (or, perhaps in this case, see the nuts and not the brittle).

Already I have digressed and I haven't even started what I thought I would talk about. There is an expression in English which says, "No good deed goes unpunished," and the nut scene is actually the good deed in this story. Piachi, after his own son dies, takes in a foundling, Nicolo, who eats nuts. Nuts are only mentioned once in the story, so we really shouldn't look on this as his defining characteristic. His defining characteristics, once he reaches adulthood, are his loose morals and the odd resemblance he has to the man who once saved his foster mother's life. If you haven't read the story, can you already see that something bad is going to happen here? It only gets worse when the realization occurs that Nicolo's name is an anagram of Colino, the name of the foster mother's rescuer. Her complaints about his loose morals lead him to impersonate Colino, which causes her to pass out when she sees Nicolo as Colino just before Piachi comes into the room. More misery occurs until the end; the final sentences quoted above. The anagram inspired me to think a bit on some difficulties in translating (the actual planned digression).

This name anagram would be easy enough to carry into English, since the Italian names would not have to be changed to Nick and Colin to be understood. This story, Das Bettelweib and the other Kleist story I am reading through, Das Erdbeben in Chili, all have names foreign to German which could easily be carried into English. The locations are also not major English- or German-speaking countries (particularly in Kleist's time), so the foreign quality of the names and the location is also maintained when translated into English. This allows for a certain distance between the reader and the story, facilitating the other-wordly character of the stories. I begin to wonder if this story had been written with English names instead in a primarily English-speaking country, would the impact be the same in an English translation? What if we eliminate the time difference a bit and make it more modern? Well, then we would obviously be dealing with a different story, but here we are confronted with choices that need to be made in translation. Should the language be modernized or should it stay a bit stiff and stuffy, if that was the style of the time? Should we maintain some word choices that might be out of date now, but accurately convey the time of the writing? There are new translations of The Bible with updated language. I read a passage in one that made mention of saxophones, which didn't exist in Biblical times. What impact does this have? If I didn't know saxophones didn't exist then, does it have any impact at all? This made me realize how implicitly we trust translators without realizing it.

Kleist is known for his elaborately constructed sentences. As I read through him a bit more, I realize there aren't as many 10 line long sentences as I thought, but there definitely are sentences that could never exist in English without some amazing grammar and punctuation gymnastics. This is definitely a part of his style, but when it leads to confusion and frustration in another language, then the translation has lost its value. Literary quality is dropped for technical exactitude. The first time I read Franz Kafka, I was in high school and I picked up The Trial on my own at the library. How painful that translation was: stilted and difficult and miserable to read. I put it down, thinking that the reason Kafka was so lauded was because he was so difficult to handle and the very few who could get through it acted as though it was the best thing in the world because no one else could read it and wouldn't argue. Well, I am glad I got to read him in German finally and realized that that was a great fault of the translation and not of Kafka. Since then, I have found much better translations in English, although I still have to admit, he isn't in my top ten authors list. Why am I preoccupied with this when E. T. A. Hoffmann is not known particularly for a heavy or dense style? Haimatochare, the first story that I am working on translating, is written as a series of letters. It seems to me that a) epistolary novels and/or stories are not very popular at this point, which may already date it a bit, and b) the style and formality of the letters may play a role in the understanding of the story. Striking a balance between ease of reading and original word choice and style is not as easy as it is when translating an experiment protocol or test results as I did once or twice long ago. I'll be posting an updated translation of the foreword to Haimatochare shortly, hopefully with the correct balance of then and now, accuracy and ease, Hoffmann and Mocarski.

Kleist's Bettelweib von Locarno 8-10-07

"The Beggarwoman of Locarno" was proably the first story I read of Heinrich von Kleist. It is very short and not too complicated. One incident is retold (at least in part) four times, so comprehension is (potentially) aided the further you read in the story if you are just beginning to read literature in German. (That's when I read it.) This primary incident occurs in the first paragraph of the story. A beggarwoman has been let into the castle by the Marquise and allowed to lay on some straw on the floor. The Marchese comes home and orders the woman behind the stove. As she crosses the room, her crutch slips, and then she dies in the corner behind the stove. The instructor I had when I first read this was really nice, but perhaps not the best to teach this story. She asked what the point was of this story, focusing on the beggarwoman. She claimed that the position behind the stove was actually a beneficial location, nice and warm. So what was the author saying? At the time I remember thinking that behind the stove did not sound ideal, but she was a college instructor, so I tried to assimilate this viewpoint into my understanding of the story. Of course now I know that in front of the stove is the good spot; in back of the stove is not. This also isn't even the main point of the story, as far as I am concerned.

The first telling of the incident of the beggarwoman is the actual occurance. The second telling occurs, when, after war and crop problems, the Marchese is looking to sell his property. The first potential buyer comes and sleeps in the room where the beggarwoman died. During the night, he hears her rise from the straw, cross the room, and then lay behind the stove. Of course, this ruins any chance for a sale. Then the Marchese decides to check out the room. Again, at midnight, the invisible woman rises, crosses and then lays down. Lastly, the Marchese, the Marquise, and a dog stay in the room. Again they all hear it, but the Marquise runs out of the castle, only to see it go up in flames as the Marchese sets it on fire.

Let's take a look at the actual language of the woman's death. After initially being ordered across the room, the beggar woman stands and slips with her crutch, injuring her back,

dergestalt, daß sie zwar noch mit unsäglicher Mühe aufstand und quer, wie es ihr vorgeschrieben war, über das Zimmer ging, hinter dem Ofen aber unter Stöhnen und Ächzen niedersank und verschied.

The words I want to draw your attention to are "Stöhnen und Ächzen." Both of these words mean moaning and groaning, which is what you would expect to hear from someone who has just hurt their back. When the first potential buyer stays in the room, he also hears "Stöhnen und Ächzen." When the Marchese stays alone in the room and hears the dead woman, he hears "Geseufz und Geröchel." These two words are "sigh and death rattle." Is it his knowledge of the end of the woman's life that alters the sounds he hears or is it guilt?

At the end of the story, the Marchese is left alone (or with the dog- we don't quite know his fate) in the room with the sounds, since the Marquise has run out. This time, the woman never completes the journey. Instead of the sounds accompanying the end of the woman's life, the Marchese grabs a dagger and yells out, "Wer da?" (Who's there?) Once the fire has consumed him, the Marchese's bones lie in the place where the beggarwoman had been when he had instructed her to move. In the end, the obvious answer to the question "Who's there?" is the Marchese himself. But why does he set the fire? As Kleist writes, he is "müde seines Lebens," that is "weary of his life." This is the explanation that brings the "sigh and death rattle" into sharper focus. This description sounds very close to someone "weary of their life."

Now, I'm not spending time doing the full academic thing; for example, I'm not researching the thousand other people who have said something about this story and fitting myself into the long line of Kleist scholarship. This is just me, looking at this story from a particular point of view in preparation for my later work. For the first time, I have looked at this story from the viewpoint of language and not storyline: it has made it a much more interesting and complex piece than its short length might hint at. For the first time, "müde seines Lebens" stood out from the long paragraph it is buried in and highlights the reason for the sale of the castle in the first place. So I admit that I am a late-comer to appreciating the density of Kleist's prose, which I previously had thought was just a function of very long sentences in long paragraphs. I don't have an easy answer on how these interrelated descriptions lead to a final statement by the author, which is what that instructor long ago had wanted us to state. Instead, I think it shows that the answer is not easy and the interrelation of people, time and events is more complicated than we normally perceive.

Kleist's Erdbeben in Chili 8-16-07

Until I make my way through my bookshelf to Kleist's dramas, this will be the last you hear of him from me. I have read more than these four posts discuss, but I think it is time to move on to another writer and other topics. Before I move on, though, I wanted to write out my disorganized thougths on Das Erdbeben in Chili.

My first reading of this story was, as with the other Kleist works, in class. I cannot complain about the level of instruction on this one, though. The professor for this class was a strict traditionalist teaching us the foundations and basis of standard scholarship on all the literature we read with her. Sure, it wasn't as exciting as the other professors who encouraged broader more creative interpretations; sure, this little old Austrian lady made all of us cry (each on different days) in one class due to her direct and unapologetic criticism of our work; but in the end I have gained an amazing amount of respect for her and her work as a teacher (certainly now that my tears are dry). For this reason, I have much less to write about this story than the others. As I began to re-read it, I quickly remembered the storyline and some of the major themes and points to the work. I also have exceptionally clear memories of this woman who taught me and the fact that once, finding out that my family was Polish and that I was brought up Catholic, she not only asked me about Our Lady of Częstochowa, but she also asked me to pray for her– and although I may be a bit out of practice, I will have to do that for her tonight, now that I think about it again.

Although this story takes place in Chile in the 1600's, it refers back (through cultural context) to the Lisbon Earthquake in 1755. This remains one of the most damaging earthquakes in history and can be seen as sparking the development of seismology. In addition, the philosophical and religious implications of the devastation caused by the earthquake in a Catholic country on All Saints' Day was not limited to Portugal. Kleist's story, along with another of his stories, Der Zweikampf, investigates the unpredictable and opaque nature of justice when read in the context of divine intervention. In Das Erdbeben in particular, the main characters, Jeronimo and Josephe, are each freed from punishment by the onset of the earthquake. In the midst of devastation they seem to have a divine reprieve, but it does not last once they walk into a church.

Another one of the topics of this story, how we respond to mass tragedy, unfortunately continues to be current in many parts of the world, making this a story worth reading and thinking about again. If you do choose to read it with this in mind, I'd love to hear your response.