Now that my collection of Wolfgang Hilbig poems is nearing its publication date and my profile of him for Poetry Magazine has been filed, I’ve been able to get back to some other long-term translation projects. The first is a collection of poems by the Swiss modernist writer Paul Klee. The second is a translation of the novel, The Senior in Jubilee, by Jean Paul Richter. I’ve written about and translated work from both of them in the newsletter before, but so far, as far I can remember, I still haven’t discussed The Senior in Jubilee, at least not in depth. Like the rest of J.P.’s work, the novel is very dense, very strange, very lighthearted, very morbid and often all of those things all at once. It tells the story of an aged minister named Schwers and the love between his philosophy-addled son Ingenuin and his adopted daughter Alithea. The senior Schwers would like to retire and have his son take his place but insists on the succession and marriage of Ingenuin and Alithea taking place on the 50th anniversary of his own succession and marriage to his wife Theodosia. Other obstacles exist. Ingenuin needs to be ordained by the local authorities. This announcement seems to come, but it’s a forgery crafted by a criminal named Lederer to insinuate himself into the household and steal some jewelry. Here is the opening:
On earth one has a thousand fine rich imperishable pleasures—in memory: our fruit and root cellars are waxen pomological cabinets of imagination. And yet on the fruit plate of happiness, I seldom encounter produce softer than a drupe. The philosopher—that noble nutcracker of all shells—seems to benefit from such things: empty miserable pleasures, which are not to be enjoyed, he can examine and explore to their core, for he competes with the warblers and the finches, who discard the sweet flesh of the cherry for the stone inside. But a girl like Alithea prefers to pick lingonberries, that so-called little plum, in which there is nothing hard, not a stone.
It was just a fortnight ago—September 3rd, 1796—, that Alithea with her fruit picker reached for such a fruit, which hung from a consistorial messenger by the name of Lederer. The girl stood along the underwood and couldn't have gone through it more five times with her comb—not a comb of horn or steel, that architectonic cowlick of the feminine coiffeur, but one made of wood, which in Thuringia is used to comb lingonberries from the moss—, when Lederer strode up in approach and, burnishing his bright messenger badge, asked Alithea how far he still had to go to Neulandpreis.
As is well known, this forest village of Flachsenfinger lies in the middle of a large birchwood cutting. The girl flew ahead of the messenger like a star of wonder, or like a lapwing, perhaps as much out of curiosity as of courtesy: for the very senior Schwers, who had much to do with ecclesiastical caretaking, was her foster father. The minister had long anticipated this evangelist: therefore the foster daughter, who was flushed even more from her anticipation than from her exertion, wished to query the messenger out of loving provision for her surrogate and spiritual family. He kept his own council, though he seemed to carry a little Canaan or Eldorado in his knapsack; but he did not unbuckle it.
With their ecclesiastical and matrimonial ambitions temporarily thwarted, J.P., in a characteristically metafictional turn, inserts himself into the narrative as an advocate for the family. The proceedings take a while, not in the diegetic time (just a fortnight, as the author indicates), but because he takes every opportunity to expound on whatever happens to cross his mind, this in a relatively slim volume of about 46,000 words. Between Sterne and Melville, forerunner and successor respectively, J.P. forms a kind of sandwich of writers who lock in by deliberately not locking in. The novel itself is subtitled An Appendix. In the prologue, J.P. congratulates himself for that particular innovation and holds forth in his own weird way about what constitutes good style in such a context.
The butterfly wings of motley ideas, which adorn and fill the insect cabinet or bell jar of the appendix, only permeate the sold German novel as a foreign supplement, just as true butterfly wings, according to Buffon, shimmer as indigestible residue in the dung of bats. The digression is never the main point of the novel; but it should never be treated as a minor matter in an appendix; there it is rubbish waiting to be swept away; here, it is set down mosaic-like on the parlor floor, a poetic asaroton such as the ancients decorated their floors with, with images of straw and bone and so on, as if the parlor were being used as a rubbish bin.
As with the previous preface by J.P. I published through the Almanac, this one is collected in an anthology by Empyrean Editions, the translation also being my own.
Often—practically daily—I wonder about what I’m doing here with this obscure German author. It’s not really a bad state of affairs. I’m not translating his work on spec, that is with the hope of future publication. The book has been commissioned by my publisher, who paid me an advance that will likely take a while to recoup. But it’s hard work. I have a half dozen reference works (digital and print) open at all times. There are times when even experts of period (18th century German literature) are baffled by what J.P. writes. And yet working on him. It allows you to unearth these strange turns of language that exist nowhere else. Critics of a more moralizing tendency might look at the oddities J.P. summons as proof that he remains justifiably obscure. Playful postmodernism (or playful pre-postmodernism) lost its luster around the end of the millennium. Accessibility and relatability are the dual monarchs of global popular culture, and critics left, right, and center have revived a kind of high seriousness that places literature in opposition to that. But J.P. is neither accessibly nor wholly serious. Despite his difficult style, he embodies the lightness that Italo Calvino valued so much in writing. It’s painstaking to produce, but this characteristic mix of moods and registers is why I spend so much time translating J.P. He can be exasperating; almost always he’s exasperating, but there’s some new interesting image. I just have to keep sweeping the floor.