Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (41 page)

And yet there must be some clue, some trace … Let’s see, let’s keep looking … the rotting ship, the figurehead … Cold, colder, they used to say in that children’s game when you searched for an object in the wrong place or in the wrong direction … Oh, you again, you’re having fun, aren’t you? But let’s see … That palace forever in flames … Warm, warmer, we’re on the right track … Fire … of course, I’ve got it! Better to be assumed among the gods like the greatest of the Argonauts, Heracles, burned on the pyre on Mount Oeta, transported to Olympus by the flames and by the fiery wind generated by the blaze. It’s useful to have people believe that the wanted man ended up crushed by that figurehead, buried somewhere, even in the park under the bench—even the biographers are convinced of it and have spread this version sanctioned by good faith—preserved by permafrost and ready to be recalled into service. An excellent ruse, you have to admit it. Chiefly because it wasn’t common for convicts to be cremated; they were in fact buried on the Isle of the Dead.

And instead … who would ever have thought of it. It must have been Black Andy. He kept his promise, paid his debt. Return to
the water the prey which that time, in the river, he had taken from it, but return it unrecognizable to everyone, including the water. He was skilful with fire, Andy was; he had started many of them in the forest, since the time he was a child. It must not have been difficult for him to burn the body and even less difficult to scatter the ashes in the Derwent, as planned, there where the current of the river-sea flows toward the Antarctic icefields. By now innocuous, despite the permafrost—fire destroys everything—even chips, those silicon memory platelets, my memory, that of others, of everyone, who knows. Those too destroyed in any case, just to be safe. There’s no longer anything that those freezing waters and those blocks of ice can preserve that could be used by new commanders of future Lagers who want to recall the dead to forced labour for life. The Cybernaut sank, he ended up in the fishes’ mouths, chewed digested eliminated, he is no more. Decentralized Central Committee, dissolved, disconnected. Eritis sicut Deus, (De)us is everywhere, nowhere, the certificate of alleged death is properly stamped and will delight all those eager to accept it as authentic.

O net, where is your hold, O cloning, where is thy sting? Hogwash, to sidetrack everyone, to sidetrack ourselves, to lighten some of the load. It was a good idea to get rid of even the
Argo
, sending it up there, and to finally ascend, no, descend to the gods, in a tomb that no one can violate—the sea is a sudarium but there’s no one down below nor will there ever be again, those motes, grains, puffs of ashes that were once flesh are no more, no one will ever recapture them, they’ve escaped forever, gobs of frothy elusive dust, a perpetual ticket of leave, the revolution has won, the Law no longer exists, the codes too have been cremated, the codes of the king, of the People’s Courts, the codes that sentence convicts. Even the genetic code was burned, volatilized, abrogated.

The perfect escape, perhaps with the complicity of someone here inside, in the ward, someone who spread a virus through the computer and tampered with the tape recordings, someone who is good at imitating all of our voices. Of course it’s a little embarrassing; even the folder has disappeared from the patients’ file cabinet, maybe it was used as paper to light that fire, that pyre, that cremation … Still, someone will have to answer for who’s missing, for who was released without a formal discharge, for who got away. When Cogoi realizes it, he’s the head doctor after all … I think I can already hear him, calm and courteous, though … as he takes off his glasses and enters my empty room, still unaware, and says, My dear Ulcigrai, how are we doing?

“
THE FIRST VAGUE IDEA
for this book”—Claudio Magris has written to his translators—“dates back to 1988. I was in Antwerp, for the presentation of the Dutch translation of
Danube
, and I was struck by some of the figureheads I saw, by those eyes gazing beyond, dilated, wide open, almost as if seeing catastrophes that others cannot see. In some confused way, I felt that the enormity which the figureheads seemed to see approaching from the sea had to do with a story that I had been carrying around inside me for years, or rather with a longstanding interest in a tragic story that had actually taken place. I have always been fascinated by actual events, by reality. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction,’ Melville wrote. The story that I had inside me, and that has appeared, albeit briefly, in other books, is the incredible story of Goli otok, that beautiful and terrible island in the Northern Adriatic where, following the Second World War, Tito set up a horrendous Gulag mainly for the Ustashi and for Yugoslavian Fascists in general and, after 1948, for Stalinists as well, since he had fallen out with Stalin. I was aware that about two thousand Italian workers from Monfalcone, a small town near Trieste, had also ended up on that island: militant communists who had had a taste of Fascist prisons, many of them experiencing Nazi concentration
camps and the war in Spain as well. They voluntarily chose to leave Italy at the end of the Second World War and, given their faith in communism, went to Yugoslavia to assist in the construction of communism in that neighbouring Communist country; after the falling-out between Tito and Stalin, they were deported to that island and subjected to all manner of torture, as in all Gulags and Lagers. They held out heroically in the name of Stalin, that is, in the name of a man who, had he won, would have turned the entire world into a Gulag for people like them, and they lived in that hell unbeknown to everyone.

“The narrator in my novel, an obviously invented figure, is one of these individuals who lived through history’s tempest and ended up on Goli Otok. I first tried writing this story in the form of a linear novel, but this approach was abandoned, although many of the novel’s elements came together in
Blindly
. Later I understood why that novel had been abandoned: in a novel, the ‘what,’ the subject, must be identical to the ‘how,’ the style, the voice in which the story is told. It was not possible to tell this terrible story, which encompasses everything, life, love—tangled, torn and lacerated, delirious, a nightmare that surges back and forth continually, like the waves of the sea—in an orderly way. The gaze of figureheads who see catastrophes is not a gaze that imposes order, at least not a conventional order. The story of that revolution, its greatness and its horrors, could not be told in an orderly manner. And in fact I was not able to tell it until I came upon the astonishing story of a late-eighteenth-century adventurer, a Danish seaman, Jorgen Jorgensen, who took part in the early British colonization of Australia and Tasmania, indeed founding the capital of Tasmania, Hobart Town, where he would return many years later as a convict in chains. The story of the grotesque revolution that he organized for three weeks
in Iceland made it possible for me to depict, as in a mirror whose reflection is distorted yet truthful, the true and great and terrible revolution, almost a distorted caricature that nevertheless discloses its infamy and greatness, along with the protagonist’s love for the woman he passionately loved and reprehensibly lost. Little by little, from that sea scanned by the figureheads, the myth of the Argonauts emerged as the unifying structure of the story I was telling, which, among many other things, is also a horrific story of the clash of cultures, of horrendous fratricidal violence, of man’s cruel abuse of power over woman, of the struggle for a prize, the golden fleece, which, like the red flag, is always in the wrong hands.

“And so
Blindly
was born: the delirious monologue of a voice in which other voices converge, intermingle and overlap, like the waves of a storm-tossed sea. The protagonist tells his own story but he also identifies with that of others, in a maelstrom of incidents at sea and sinking into the unconscious, which certainly represents a great challenge for those who translate the book—those who become in some ways a co-author, and who are obliged to seek out that order that nonetheless underlies the turmoil and storm of events and gives them meaning, purport and direction.”

Besides having a story to tell, Magris is a consummate stylist. Some of the most striking stylistic features of the text that engaged me as translator are the recurring images, the intentionally repeated language, the deliberately long sentences, a sustained ambiguity, a tendency to paraphrase and an alternation of voices.

Recurring images, such as the fire in the royal palace, act as leitmotifs throughout the work, and the author was quite clear that they should be described with the same words and expressions each time, creating a kind of linguistic refrain. The interaction of the words—their relationships to one another and their rhythmic
pattern—was important to maintain, since the configuration often reveals subliminal meanings operating below the semantic level and contributes to a certain emotional mood. Somewhat like the chord progression in Pachelbel’s Canon, each repetition offers a slight variation on the previous one, and the recurrences of the major themes and images (the fire, the figurehead, Nelson’s blind eye, etc.) serve to heighten the intended effect. The carefully orchestrated sentences and persistent imagery signal a precise organization, a systematic organic structure, with key images and phrasing establishing patent links between recurring analogous passages.

Intentionally repeated language is another stylistic feature. A word or phrase will very often be repeated in the same sentence or paragraph. These reiterations function as a kind of mantra, the repetition of words being also a replication of their sound and cadence.

Deliberately long sentences that run on and on, with a level of subordinate clauses that defies generally accepted English syntax, are intentional and contribute to the tumultuous rhythm of the text. At the same time they are a syntactical expression of the protagonist’s turbulence and confused state of mind. Series without commas also contribute to the rhythm of the text, somewhat like a crescendo, building and swelling. The reader feels the intensity of the speaker’s sensations and may also be disoriented, derailed. In this way, the reader comes to share the speaker’s confusion and state of agitation. In some cases these sentences are like nested dolls, with clauses snugly nestled one inside the other, a labyrinthine maze through which the reader can arrive at different interpretations depending on how his mind moves among the various elements. Then too, there is no reason why a long sentence can’t be both clear and elegant at the same time. In Magris’s sentences, complex though they may be, no
word ever seems randomly placed; rather each word seems to have a precise function. If the sentence expands and swells it’s because the experience it expresses expands and opens out.

Sustained ambiguity is another stylistic choice intentionally embraced by Magris, perhaps because of the interest it creates by resisting the reader’s expectations. One area in which ambiguity operates is the names of individuals. As in Borges’s bibliographies, Magris chose to maintain a certain degree of uncertainty and doubt as to which names refer to actual historical figures and which are fictional. The opening sentence itself plunges us into confusion on two counts: “My dear Cogoi, to tell the truth I’m not so sure that no one is able to write a man’s life as well as he can, even though I was the one who wrote that.” The name Cogoi itself recalls a saying in Triestine dialect, “
Caro Cogoi, semo cagai
,” which literally means “
siamo cagati
,” “we’re in deep shit,” “we’re fucked.” And the reader has no way of knowing for sure whether the words “no one is able to write a man’s life as well as he can,” initially paraphrased and later cited, are actually drawn from Jorgen Jorgensen’s autobiography. (They were in fact printed in the
Hobart Town Almanack
, in “A shred of Autobiography,” Part 1, January 1835; Part 2, April 1838.) Add to that the fact that all language is intrinsically ambiguous, that the speaker (or speakers) rarely orients the reader, and that there is no reliable timeline of events so that settings and events must be inferred. The ambiguity ultimately extends to the identity of the speaker and other characters in the novel. The protagonist’s multi-reality, which crosses time and space boundaries, means that the narrator’s voice is in a sense duplicitous: the “I” is problematic narratively speaking since it is more than one. Moreover, the speaker himself struggles to distinguish between memory, reality, fantasy, lies and
truth; consequently it is unclear which events are “real” and which occur in the landscape of his mind.

A tendency to paraphrase is evident in the quotations, direct and indirect, which tend toward rephrasing, re-elaboration, reinterpretation and the creative addition of new elements. Sometimes these passages are indicated by quotation marks, sometimes not. Again, the ambiguity is intentional. I found these fascinating to trace, not unlike a hunt for hidden treasure. For example, the words “that my sad but instructive vicissitudes might descend unwept into the darkness of a long, silent night” paraphrase a quotation from Jorgensen’s autobiography, which reads: “the sad but instructive vicissitudes of his fate to pass by unwept and unrecorded … wrapped up in the darkness of a long and silent night—illacrymabiles.” The passage in turn harks back to Horace,
Odes
, IV:9: “
Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona / Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles / Urgentur, ignotique longa / Nocte, carent quia vate sacro
” (Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all are unknown and unwept, lost in a long night, because they lack a sacred poet to chronicle their deeds).

Sometimes the paraphrasing takes the form of retold tales. The tale about the old woman and the lost shoe, for instance, is a retelling of the myth in which Jason loses a sandal while helping a beggar woman, the goddess Hera in disguise, across a stream; the bundle the old woman is carrying is the golden fleece. Elsewhere we find a retelling of the incident at the Symplegades, also known as the Clashing Rocks. A pair of rocks at the Bosporus that clashed together randomly, they were defeated by Jason and the Argonauts, who would have been killed by them had it not been for Phineas’s advice to let a dove fly between the rocks. Jason does so, and the bird loses only its tail feathers, and the Argonauts row mightily to
get through, losing only part of the stern ornament. While in the
Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodios
the dove flies away unscathed, in Magris’s version it plunges to its death.