A Different Stripe

Translating James Joyce with Stefan Zweig—and James Joyce

In the introduction to our (soon to be released) edition of Stefan Zweig's Journey Into the Past, André Aciman remarks that "it is difficult to think of any European worthy of notice in the early decades of the past century whose biography would not at one point or another invoke the name of Stefan Zweig." And Zweig's own autobiography likewise references many notables. In the following, taken from the 1943 translation of Zweig's World of Yesterday, he talks about meeting, and working with, James Joyce:

When I became acquainted with James Joyce . . . he harshly rejected all association with England. He was Irish. True, he wrote in the English language but did not think in English and didn’t want to think in English. “I’d like a language,” he said, “which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.” This was not quite clear to me; I did not know of his Ulysses, on which he was then working; he had merely lent me A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his only copy, and his little drama Exiles which I had thought to translate in order to be of use to him. The better I knew him the more his incredible knowledge of languages astonished me; his round firmly sculptured brow, which shone smooth like porcelain in the electric light, stored every vocable of every idiom and he was brilliantly able to toss and keep them balanced in the air. Once when he asked how I would reproduce a difficult sentence in the Portrait of the Artist in German, we attempted it first in French and then in Italian; for every word he was prepared with four or five in each idiom, even those in dialect, and he knew their value and weight to the finest nuance.

Hard evidence of Zweig's literary fame can be found in the Stefan Zweig collection at SUNY Fredonia. Here you can peruse some 6,000 letters sent to Zweig from the likes of "Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, Richard Strauss, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, Jules Romains, Joseph Roth, Frans Masereel..." along with "a good sampling of" translations of his books, which were translated into 50-odd languages.

A sadder reminder of Zweig's notoriety is on view at an LA Times blog post of a few years back, which reproduces the front page of the paper from May 3rd, 1938. The article is headlined, "Austria Sees Nazi Fire of Jewish Books," and it tells of the burning of Zweig's works, along with  works by other prominent writers. 

Finally, it's worth reading Clive James's appraisal of Zweig, reproduced in Slate a few years back.

 

 

On Sorokin translator Sally Laird

Translator, editor, and writer Sally Laird died last month in Denmark. NYRB publishes her translation of Vladimir Sorokin's The Queue, but Sally's contribution to the series (and to the dissemination of Central European) goes further, in the form of her participation in the Central European Classics series, without which the English-speaking world might never have had the chance to become acquainted with fine and fascinating writers like Gyula Krúdy, Dezso Kosztolányi, Jan Neruda, and Boleslaw Prus.

For an overview of her life and career, see the Guardian's obituary, which far from being simply a clinical tally of a life, is movingly written by Kate Kellaway

At The Index on Censorship (a journal she once edited) Robert Chandler writes:

Sally was unusually gifted in many ways, probably in more ways than I know. Whatever she set her mind to — a large portfolio of drawings of a family of bears produced at the age of thirteen, her work as chief editor of Index on Censorship in her late twenties and early thirties, the many reviews on Russia-related books that she wrote for Prospect, the TLS, the Guardian and the Observer — she carried out conscientiously and with imagination. Her translations of Petrushevaksaya and Sorokin are note perfect. And I know no book that presents a more nuanced picture of Soviet literary life in the post-Stalin years than Sally’s Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers.

And of her own work on The Queue, a highly idiomatic book she had the opportunity to revise (following Sorokin's own revisions to the text) twenty years after the initial translation, she wrote perceptively about the interplay between the form and content of a story that at first might appear  as improvised and insubstantial as the human line it records:

A novel so firmly anchored in time and place, and which relies entirely on colloquial speech, poses certain problems to the translator....The people in Sorokin’s queue speak in laconic, ritualized utterances perfectly suited to their survival in the context, but not always easily transferable to English. Still, what one might call the “deep grammar” of the book—to want, to wait, to be thwarted, to get—is universal; it forms the basis for our compassion.

For more memories of Sally Laird, read the complete text of Robert Chandler's tribute and also the comments left below.

Talking permaculture and the Russian soul with nyrb classics contributors

Every now and then our translators manage to shut down their computers, put the dust-cover on the typewriter, and talk about their work in the wild.

First, Larry Korn—who lived on Masanobu Fukuoka's farm in Japan in the 1970s and returned to the US, where he translated The One Straw Revolution and spread his sensei's teachings—will co-teach a two-week intensive permaculture design course at Restoration Farm in Oregon, beginning June 13.

Next, Robert Chandler, who has been translating the work of Vasily Grossman since the 1980s and who is very much responsible for the author's acclaim as one of the most important Soviet writers, has three events in London this month. The first is taking place tonight at the Free Word Center. And in the upcoming two, he'll be discussing Grossman's recently released novel Everything Flows and talking with Grossman's daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman:

June 15, 7.30pm, Pushkin House
June 20, 2pm, British Museum, Stevenson Room

(thanks to Sarah J. Young for rounding up these Grossman-related events, as well as for linking some recent press in praise of Vasily Grossman, on her blog)

The Bodice Ripped: Or a comparison of Two Translations of No Tomorrow

In which we gladly retreive the gauntlet thrown by the Asylum

In a recent post on Asylum, John Self reviews Vivant Denon's novella, Point de Lendemain, which we recently published in Lydia Davis's translation as No Tomorrow. He, however, had only the Penguin Syren edition, which was translated by David Coward, to quote from. We were struck by the difference between the two translations, particularly in the very first line of the story. Now, David Coward has a Scott Moncrieff prize to his name, so we think he won't mind a friendly comparison between the two translations.

First up, the first sentence, which is is among the best of any work we've published (right up there with Hartley's "The past is a foreign country, etc. etc"):

I was desperately in love with the Comtesse de —— ; I was twenty years old and I was naive. She deceived me, I got angry, she left me. I was naive, I missed her. I was twenty years old, she forgave me, and, because I was twenty years old, because I was naive—still deceived, but no longer abandoned—I thought myself to be the best-loved lover, and therefore the happiest of men.

The Syren:

I doted on the Countess ______; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I was incensed; she deserted me. I was naive, I missed her; I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naive, and, though still deceived, no longer deserted, I believed that lover was never more loved than I and I was therefore the happiest man alive.

The original:

J’aimais éperdument la comtesse de ——; j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J’étais ingénu, je la regrettai; j’avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna; et comme j’avais vingt ans, que j’étais ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l’amant le mieux aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes.

Exhibit 2 contains, at least in Coward's translation, an eye-catching phrase, one that's become a catchword for a certain type of literature. Can you spot it? It doesn't figure in the Lydia Davis translation:

When lovers are too ardent, they are less refined. Racing toward climax, they overlook the preliminary pleasures: they tear at a knot, shred a piece of gauze. Lust leaves its traces everywhere, and soon the idol resembles a victim. 

The Syren:

Unbridled passion murders niceness of feeling. We run toward pleasure and ride roughshod over the delights which precede it. A ribbon is snapped, a bodice is ripped: desire leaves its mark in its wake and soon the idol of our heart looks uncommonly like its victim.

The original:

Trop ardent, on est moins délicat. On court à la jouissance en confondant tous les délices qui la précèdent: on arrache un nœud, on déchire une gaze: partout la volupté marque sa trace, et bientôt l’idole ressemble à la victime.

We leave it to the reader to decide which edition he'd rather spend time with. Of course, the Syren edition is no longer in print, and the brand spanking new NYRB edition comes with an engaging introduction by Princeton professor Peter Brooks (an introduction that almost makes us wish we were back in school, just to take a class with the man, who must be an astonishing lecturer) as well as the complete French text.

We can't tease John Self too much, because we'd never even heard of the Syren classic series before he pointed it out (much less gone about collecting them obsessively, as he has). As he rightly says, Syren was doing the art of the novella in the mid-90s, well before Pushkin and Melville House began their own like-minded projects.

A Letter from the Editor on Andrey Platonov (and a sale)

T.J. Clark and Michael Ondaatje discuss the work of Andrey Platonov as part of the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival. See more photos from the event here.

There are certain writers who feature in a large way in the NYRB Classics series—some, like Simenon and Victor Serge, I've written about in the past; others, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, perhaps the most purely original of modern English storytellers, I mean to. Here I want to say a little bit about Andrey Platonov, whose Soul and Other Stories we published last year and whose great and harrowing novel The Foundation Pit we have just put out in a striking new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, the first translation of the book in English to be based on the recently established definitive Russian text.

As a plaudit, "recently established definitive Russian text" may sound like a pedantic mouthful, but Platonov is anything but a writer of merely academic interest. He is the twentieth century Russian novelist who, more than any other (more than Pasternak, more than Solzhenitsyn, more even than Bulgakov), Russians will tell you has added to and transformed the great tradition of Russian literature. Russians may also tell you that if you are one of those unfortunates who doesn't read Russian, just how great Platonov is you'll never know. I'm one of those unfortunates, I confess, but then I'm confident that, as a rule—a rule to which Platonov is no exception—great literature translates. I first encountered this extraordinary writer's work in an old and uncertain translation based on a censored text, a book given to me by a friend of my father's who I later learned was an agent for the CIA. Even so, I knew I was hearing a voice as distinct and powerful as any to emerge in the twentieth century, a writer who not only reflected the unimaginable realities of modern history, but actively shifted reality, staggering us, making us see the world in a strange and disorienting new light. At last, with this new translation, the greatness of Platonov, the difference that he makes, become unmistakable for readers of English.

Platonov was born into a working-class family in 1899 and grew up with the Russian Revolution, which he initially embraced with enthusiasm and never disavowed. For better or for worse, Platonov's world is the world after the Revolution, with which a new reality begins. Platonov, however, is hardly a conventionally realistic writer, since the nature of the post-Revolutionary world is that history has ended and reality has been upended, replaced by a heady brew of utopian anticipations and nightmarish premonitions. This is the paradoxical regime of progress—appearing no doubt in an extreme form under Communism, but common to all modern societies—under which everything is understood to exist on the condition that it is to be replaced by something better, and so may be judged as already obsolescent; a bipolar world in which exterior and internal realities become weirdly intermixed and people seesaw between irrational exuberance (it wasn't a Communist who coined that phrase) and boundless melancholy. In The Foundation Pit a character feels himself "hurtling forwards into the distance of history, towards the summit of universal and unprecedented times." Another remarks dolefully, "Everybody dies of life. In the end there's just bones."

Written in the early thirties, The Foundation Pit is Platonov's most direct reckoning with Revolutionary terror. The novel describes the devastation caused in the late 1920s by Stalin's twin policies of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture—a Revolution from Above that was no less important and traumatic than the Revolution of 1917. The story begins when Voshchev, a classic Chekhovian luftmensch, is fired from his job for excessive "thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor." Voshchev wanders out into the country where he happens upon a group of workers engaged in constructing a grand new All-Proletarian Home, a title which is meant entirely literally. Among them is Zhachev, a bitter, irascible, scabrous, mutilated veteran, who hauls himself around on a little cart, a freak, in his own words. Also there is Chiklin, the hardworking single-minded earnest proletarian, determined to get things right, though not entirely sure what that means. Voshchev joins this oddly assorted group which soon adopts an orphan girl in whom they place all their hopes for the future. Nastya is a strange waif:

"Now who might you be, my little girl?" asked Safronov [a Revolutionary zealot]. "What did your dear mama and papa do?"

"I'm nobody," said the little girl.

"How can you be nobody? Some kind of principle of the female sex must have been pleased to oblige you, if you got yourself born under Soviet power?"

"But I didn't want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois.... When only bourgeoisie lived, I couldn't be born, because I didn't want to be born. But now that Stalin's become, I've become too!"

Soon it becomes clear that the task of digging the pit is unending—almost by definition, since it must accommodate the whole (no pun intended) of the future: the pit is a inverted tower of Babel or, as it eventually turns out, an immense grave. Because after the mysterious death of the zealot Safronov, digging the pit takes second place to making sure that construction will not be sabotaged by "counter-revolutionary elements." The peasantry in particular must be purified. But purification also turns out to be an unending task, and in an extraordinary scene, at once savagely satirical and disconcertingly moving, in the midst of a simultaneous blizzard of snow and flies, pro-revolutionary workers and condemned peasants, doomed to die, gather in the yard of a collective farm as in a church to kiss and forgive each other:

"All right now, comrades?" asked Chiklin.

"Yes," came the word from the whole of the OrgYard. "Now we feel nothing at all—only dust and ashes remain in us."

Voshchev was lying a little way apart and he was quite unable to fall asleep without the peace of truth inside his own life—he got up from the snow and entered into the midst of people.

"Greetings!" he said, rejoicing, to the collective farm. Now you've become like me. I'm nothing too."

"Greetings!" The entire collective farm rejoiced at this one man....

All that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village—just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity.

I mentioned the Tower of Babel above, and as even these brief excerpts from The Foundation Pit must suggest, there is no discussing the book without considering its strange language, a mixture of political groupspeak, biblical allusion, slapstick, and bereft lyricism, a kind of language of unlikeness. It is a made-up language and a traumatized one—made dead, you could say. It is at once the babble of infancy, the lying cant of corruption, an outcry of desperation, and the voice, against all odds, of hope. Part of the fascination of the work is that the reader is perpetually unsure which register it is pitched in.

Platonov, as much as Beckett and Kafka, is a major writer of the twentieth century and, like them, he is a writer in extremis. Kafka's statement that "hope is infinite, but not for us" might come from Platonov. These are all writers who in different ways recognize the terror, tedium, and sheer contingency of the modern world. And yet in the later stories collected in Soul, Platonov shows us something else, something more in tune with Chekhov: people trying to rescue from the flux of life and the disaster of history some memorable and sustaining moment of true feeling. In "The Return," a story beloved by the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald, a man returns from World War II to wife and family and—and almost leaves. The art of the story is to capture in that prolonged moment of hesitation the entirety of life. And in the nightmarish world of The Foundation Pit, too, a similar tenderness, however bare-knuckled, can be discerned. As Zhachev remarks, "It's best to love something small and living and do yourselves in with labor! Exist, you bastards, for now!"

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Listen to T.J. Clark read from The Foundation Pit
The Foundation Pit is currently on sale for 30% off the cover price.
Read why Elise Blackwell thinks that Platonov "will soon take his place on the shortest list of Russian-language literary giants."

Translation awards season

Photo: Caitlin Burke, via flickr

We haven't shared the good news, of which there is quite a bit:

Joel Rotenberg's translation of Stefan Zweig's Post-Office Girl is a finalist for the 2009 PEN Translation Prize

The late Douglas Parmée's translation of Guy de Maupassant's Afloat is a runner up for the French-American Foundation's Translation Prize

And Jamey Gambrell's translation of Vladimir Sorokin's Ice has been shortlisted for the Rossica Translation Prize, which honors excellence in translations from Russian

A Poem by Hungarian Writer Tibor Déry

In getting together our edition of Tibor Déry's (that's Déry Tibor to you Magyarphiles) novel Niki we came across some poems of his, published in the short-lived Dokumentum, a journal he helped edit. After dropping some not-so-subtle hints to poet and translator George Szirtes (who has written the introduction to Niki) that it would be wonderful to read the poetry in English, he graciously had a go at translating one or two. We should mention that the poems would not have been found had they not been digitized by the New York Public Library.

MY GOLDFISH

born into sunlight
they swam around her silent
one spring night they entered my heart

the well of resurrection!
their golden ferries glittered through my breast
look at them dancing!
years march on monotonous in the garden greenhouse
here and there a face leans towards me
and sheds its tears

feed my goldfish
the wind moans outside
day’s leaden back casts its shadow across us
days pass
who will unearth time’s infinite gifts from my body?

in the dust of the street…
there sprawl the lost nights
gilded wooden statues of beggars march along the boulevard
everywhere darkness
the stars above them: the purple-scaled highway of my fish

George Szirtes webpage and blog


Niki: The Story of a Dog
Tibor Déry

On Douglas Parmée

Scholar and translator Douglas Parmée—who translated two NYRB Classics, The Child by Jules Vallès and Afloat by Guy de Maupassant—died last August. What follows is an expanded version of the obituary that ran in the London Times.

Douglas Parmée was a lecturer in modern languages at Cambridge—and a fellow of Queens’ College for sixty years— who also became known for the number and quality of his translations. These included Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane) and Bel-Ami (Guy de Maupassant) for Penguin Classics; A Sentimental Education (Gustave Flaubert), Nana (Emile Zola) and Les Liaisons dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos) for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series; and, for Short Books, a selection from the aphorist and epigrammatist Nicolas Chamfort. He also published two anthologies, Twelve French Poets (Longman 1957), which became for some years an A-level textbook, and its successor Fifteen French Poets (Longman 1974), which did not.

As well as being Director of Studies in French and having various other college jobs in the pluralistic Cambridge way, he spent time at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica and in Barbados and at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

The style of his work can be judged from a review of Liaisons, which praised a racy, colloquial and accurate translation, a concise, well-honed, elegant introduction and helpful and informative notes. It was this raciness, allied to his remarkable facility with languages and a relish for the unconventional – perhaps a distaste for the conventional as well – that led him into some of the byways of Francophone literature, including the crique-craque tradition of Haitian folk fables, which he would assert were superior to those of La Fontaine, especially to anyone who expressed the opposite view. He went to Papa Doc’s Haiti from Jamaica and became the English expert on Haitian literature, giving talks on the Third Programme. This feeling for négritude, though not assumed, gave him further pleasure by the irritation it caused to some. Symbolism and Surrealism were also among his interests, but his true forte was a deep knowledge of and admiration for French novelists of the nineteenth century.

He was born in West Dean in Sussex in 1914 – despite the name, there is no French blood in the family for at least the preceding three hundred years – and was at Simon Langton Boys’ School in Canterbury before his father, an Inspector of Schools, moved to Cambridge and his son entered the Perse School. There he thrived, leaving in 1933 to go up to Trinity College, Cambridge as a teacher training college student, a now non-existent category, spurning an exhibition offered by Downing College. At Trinity he took a first in both parts of the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos – a starred first in Part II - becoming an exhibitioner in 1934 and a senior scholar in 1935. He left in 1936 to do post-graduate work at the University of Bonn and a doctorate at the Sorbonne. During this time he received various scholarships and studentships from Trinity, including the Dunning in 1938 and the Rouse Ball in 1940.

Although his doctoral thesis—on the symbolist Henri de Régnier—had been completed and indeed published, as was then the rule, he never took the degree, either because the war intervened or, as was sometimes said, in a fit of pique on his part at some Sorbonne functionary's trying to charge a fee which he felt he had already paid. He certainly owned the academic hood.

Back in England, he became Secretary of the Students’ Department in the London office of the British Council from 1939 to 1941. It was in this capacity that he found himself at a lunch for another symbolist poet, Paul Valéry, whose description of the inadequate wine he was offered – “Mais, c’est curieux” – he treasured.

In 1941 he was claimed by RAF Intelligence and then, very naturally, the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where he worked in Hut 3 as part of the team, eventually nearly 600 strong, that translated, analysed and interpreted the decrypts from Hut 6. It was while there that he met and married in 1944 Gwen Hepworth (“Wendy”—he had a habit of using his own versions of names and places), on secondment to Hut 6 from the Foreign Office; his best man was the irascible Glaswegian John Cairncross, later exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union and dubbed the Fifth Man by the press.

After VE Day he was sent to Berlin; he was horrified not only by the condition of the defeated Germans, but by some of their conquerors’ behaviour to them, in particular that of a brother officer who, having agreed the price of a pleasure-boat with its owner’s widow in cigarettes, paid her in Woodbines.

Once again back in England, in 1946 he joined the French department at Cambridge, not long thereafter becoming a fellow of Queens’ College, where he remained until he retired. After the enormous success, noted above, of his anthology Twelve French Poets, he turned to translation. Some indication of his output’s range and extent can be had from observing that, as well as the classics already mentioned, it included Sons of Kings (Les Pléiades) by Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, the thriller Dossier 51 by Gilles Perrault, eight of the articles in Italian Fascisms from Pareto to Gentile (from the Italian), Rosa Luxemberg, a reappraisal, by Lelio Basso, also from the Italian, The Second World War by Henri Michel (co-awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize) and An Exemplary Life (Das Vorbild) by Siegfried Lenz, which won an award from the PEN Club of New York.

He enjoyed giving lectures, despite modestly having described that activity as casting false pearls before real swine; his became very popular: perhaps the undergraduates who liked his irreverence and wit were hoping for a repeat of the legendary if not mythical occasion he lectured on Surrealism dressed only in cap, gown and black tights. He was also Steward of his college and on the wine committee, duties from which he derived much pleasure.

He was divorced from his first wife in the early Seventies, soon marrying Meg—Margaret Clarke, then a research student - with whom he went to live in Adelaide, South Australia, after his retirement in 1981, when he was made a life fellow of Queens’. The location, with a very good library and no more than an hour or two’s drive from three significant wine-producing areas, was carefully chosen.

In retirement, with no academic distractions, he worked on his translations harder than ever; with no need for income from them, his tastes for the recondite or undervalued as well as for the classics could be expressed. The new selection from Chamfort gave him particular pleasure, with its uncynical and humorous appreciation of human nature comparable, he felt, with Montaigne; he also gained great satisfaction from The Child by Jules Vallès, an autobiographical novel dedicated to everyone who was bored at school.

Outside his pursuit of literature as a professional he had an abiding interest in all the arts, being a keen concert-, gallery- and filmgoer. In earlier days he had been fond of the company of convivial wits, having been well-acquainted with, among others, the belligerent critic and boozer John Davenport; Kingsley Amis’s horror when told he would have to teach Conrad amused him particularly. His interest in wine has been mentioned; he had a good palate and was both knowledgeable and experienced. He was widely travelled, both in Europe and outside; in the Fifties and Sixties, the Long Vacation usually saw him leaving Grantchester Meadows to cross the Channel en famille, first in a Vauxhall Velox, then with a Berkeley Cavalier caravan behind his short wheelbase Land Rover or, later, his Austin Westminster. He was not a good driver—and a worse back-seat driver: his adjurations to “keep the revs up” have passed into the family language. He had also been a reckonable tennis and squash player; at school, though not having an especially large or powerful physique, he had set a shot-putting record which stood for many years.

The geographical position of Australia in the Far East led to the development of an interest in the Dao that reflected his own quietist and patient approach to life. As, though tended devotedly by Meg, his health began slowly to decline, this attitude allowed the departure of successive physical faculties to be met not with resignation but with resolution to make the best of what remained.

He is survived by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage and by his second wife and their son.

Douglas Parmée, translator and academic, was born on June 6, 1914. He died in his sleep on August 11, 2008, aged 94.

© Nicholas Parmée 2008

"The reader is the ghost": The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor Storm

 

A letter from the editor of NYRB Classics
The Rider on the White Horse is currently available from www.nyrb.com at 30% off the cover price.

Everything's up in the air at the start of Theodor Storm's novella The Rider on the White Horse, written in 1888 when Storm, who was not only a celebrated author but also a distinguished jurist, was on his deathbed. The story begins—begins almost reluctantly—with a strange confusion of voices. First we hear what we take to be the author—only he disclaims authorship. He tells us that we are about to read a story that he read maybe a half century ago in a magazine, a magazine that in the years since he has never been able to track down, a story, he somewhat puzzlingly adds, of which "nothing external" has ever reminded him. The story follows: its narrator, traveling along the coast of the North Sea, is caught in a terrible storm; battered by wind and waves, he repeatedly glimpses a spectral horseman galloping furiously and soundlessly past him. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and now the local schoolmaster steps in. It is he who tells what you might call the story proper—a ghost story, yes, but also, as these overlapping voices might suggest, a story that has a ghostly life of its own.

At first, however, there is nothing uncanny about the story the schoolmaster tells, about a young man making his way in the world sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hauke Heien is a boy from a modest farming background who, with a talent for numbers and a fascination with the ways of water, apprentices himself to the local dikemaster and soon makes himself indispensable. When the dikemaster dies, his mantle falls upon Hauke, who also marries, very happily, his daughter. It is a success story.

Hauke's story is set, as I mentioned, on the edge of the North Sea, in Frisia, where the proper construction and maintenance of dikes is crucial not only to the safety but also to the well-being of the community: as the network of dikes expands, so does the availability of land for grazing or cultivation. To open new fields, Hauke orders the construction of a new dike, built on new principles. Content with things as they are, the villagers grumble about the project. The dikemaster, however, is not lightly disobeyed, and they undertake it. They are—and this is where the story begins to grow unsettling—truly horrified when, after two years, the work approaches conclusion, and the dikemaster intervenes to prevent a step without which it will all have been in vain. "Something living has got to go into it," one man tells Hauke, "Even our grandfathers knew that much...."

Hauke ordains that no sacrifice will take place. The dike is built and holds. The new land is cleared. Reason trumps superstition. Progress is made. So it appears, and yet Hauke remains a lonely figure, with only wife and child for company, distrusted by the larger community. He has done his job, neglecting nothing, except perhaps something about the human. He rides on his white horse along his dike and feels himself to be "at the center of all the Frisians alive and dead....[towering] above them all."

There is an extraordinary moment in The Rider on the White Horse when Hauke's wife is sick, and Hauke, unusually, prays:

O God, don't take her away from me! I can't do without her and You know it!... I know You can't always do just what You want to do—not even You.... Speak to me! Just a breath!

Silence. A silence that is at the heart of Storm's story, where the natural world is prowled by supernatural apparitions, while the supernatural itself, the divine—even the poignantly limited God, able only to help a bit, that Hauke addresses—never appears. A world in which you cannot trust your eyes or anything, much less—Hauke will discover—know yourself.

I'm not going to reveal the end—you'll want to find it out yourself, I hope—and ruin the suspense, which mounts powerfully as the story proceeds. I will say that by the end we have been returned, in richer and stranger ways than we might have ever imagined, to the beginning: we are up in the air again. I began by noting the author's odd disclaimer about "nothing external" having ever reminded him of the story he happened upon long ago and now intends to tell again, and one thing that becomes clear in the course of that telling is that the landscape of the story is an interior landscape—the landscape of conscience, say, where the real and the unreal exist under continual threat of confusion, kept apart by only the most fragile and provisional barriers—though Storm's mud slicks, icy marshes, fog banks, crashing waves, and vulnerable dikes, not to mention Hauke and the villagers, never strike us as anything but unforgettably real.

And as to what I also mentioned to begin with, the strangely layered voices by which the story is relayed, by the end it is clear, I think, that the story we have heard is essentially choral: the story of any community and the sacrifices by which it ensures its survival; the story of the isolated souls that constitute all communities and of their deaths. Storm, as I said, was unsure he would live to complete it, and in the background of the story you can hear something like the dead saying to the living (as the living suppose), You are who we were and will be who we are. One of the mysterious effects of this extraordinary work is that at some point the modern reader realizes with a shock that he too is included—included already—in this ghostly chorus. It is ghost story in which, you could say, the reader is brought up short by his own apparition. The reader is the ghost.

The Rider on the White Horse is the title story and masterpiece in a selection of Storm's novellas and stories translated by the very fine American poet James Wright for the Signet Classics series, when it was edited by E.L. Doctorow. If I see a book from that series that I haven't read, I always pick it up, and in this case I was especially interested because of Wright's involvement. I'd always meant to read Storm, though more as a matter of duty, I suppose, than anticipated delight. It's not often that one starts a long story, finds oneself pulled irresistibly along through it, and finishes it both astonished and convinced that it is, in the strongest sense of the word, great—a work that will deepen with rereading, that matters. That was my experience with The Rider on the White Horse.

Ecosocialism in the UK

Richard Greeman, the power behind the Victor Serge Society and translator of many of Serge's works, including Unforgiving Years, is presently on a speaking tour of Great Britain, discussing "Capitalist and Ecological Collapse: An Eco-socialist Solution." He says,

"There can be no future without a dream, no progress without the hope of Utopia. So let us then begin now by trying to imagine a technically feasible, ecologically sustainable post-capitalist future and visualizing historically possible roads leading to it. The ‘New Archimedes’ hypothesis  – based on theories of cybernetics, chaos, emergence and Castoriadis’ Content of Socialism – connects a historically proven lever of worker solidarity and a 21st Century philosophical fulcrum (planetary consciousness) and a global electronicplace to stand  (the Internet) where the billions can unite in solidarity in order to lift the earth before it succumbs to capitalist ecocide.”

to contact Richard Greeman about details of the the tour, email "eurojournalists at lapost dot net" and a preview of his book, Dangerous Shortcuts and Vegetarian Sharks can be found here. 

Details of the tour follow.