Two Prose Poems by Eugene Jolas
From I Have Seen Monsters and Angels
Though he was born in New Jersey, the life of Eugene Jolas (1894–1952) reads like one of those anecdotes historians use to dramatize the political and cultural upheavals of 20th-century Europe. As a young child, Jolas emigrated with his parents back to Lorraine, a long fought-over border region between France and Germany, which was then under the control of the German Empire. The territory would change hands three more times during Jolas’ life. “I awoke,” he writes, “in the mood of the thousand-year-old frontier scission.” Along with French, Jolas acquired German as the language of instruction in school, only learning English, what he considered to be his native language, at the age of 17, when he returned to America, “the diaspora-wilderness of the legendary immigrant.”
Jolas used this frontier background as a substrate for his own poetic “language of the night”, showcased in I Have Seen Monsters and Angels, a collection of poems, fragments, and dream narratives that has recently been reprinted by Empyrean Editions, part of their efforts to revive key modernists fallen into obscurity. In 1927, as an expatriate living in Paris, Jolas founded the literary journal transition. It became one of the leading organs of the movement, publishing Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and Samuel Beckett, among other notables. Following Pound's dictum that a great age of literature is also a great age of translators, the magazine was early to publish Gottfried Benn and Franz Kafka in English. Contributors from the visual arts included Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. transition also serialized “fragments from a Work in Progress” by James Joyce, what would later become Finnegans Wake.
Reading I Have Seen Monsters and Angels, the shared method of Jolas and Joyce becomes immediately apparent: multilingual punning as a figuration of history, myth, and dream. But unlike the sprawling family saga of Finnegans Wake, Jolas works in miniature; his pieces, often no more than a page or two in length, draw heavily from his life as a working-class immigrant. To chase away the dreariness of tenement life, Jolas imagined himself as a somnambulant conquistador, his fortunes reversed, like Columbus or Pizzaro, “in an incredible Dream-America, a world of real-unreal ambiance.” Deeper into the book, the language becomes more abstract and impersonal, corresponding to a growing maturity perhaps. Stray words in French or German turn into whole passages; the coinages in English become gnomic. The effect is fittingly surreal, the grotesque of the cultic grotto, with recognizable scenes decohering into a protean mass of hallucinated associations. In that sense, Jolas anticipates later developments in the German avant-garde, particularly Bottom's Dream, by decades. Though Joyce had already made a significant impact with Ulysses, the rise of the Nazi regime and the Second World War put a temporary (though severe) hold on his influence; Jolas himself ceased literary activities in 1942 to aid the Allied war effort.
Coming across these untranslated passages, I wanted to try my hand at rendering one or two of them into English. I learned for the umpteenth time that brevity does not equal ease. My efforts were aided (that means “barely made possible”) by various dictionaries of regional speech. Along with his coinages and good old dependable Hochdeutsch, Jolas borrowed heavily from Lorraine Franconian, the German dialect of his childhood, but also went as far afield as Vorarlberg in Austria to find linguistic novelties. One characteristic example is “Bremmen”, not the Hanseatic trading city but a local word for broom or laburnum, a thorny leguminous shrub with bright yellow flowers, native to Western Europe but highly invasive in mild coastal climates around the world. Die Goldene Bremm, The Golden Broom, is another name for Jolas’ home region, specifically between the German Saarland and the French Moselle, indicative of the natural beauty and tenaciousness of the inhabitants along the border.
The translations below are works in progress. Unlike Finnegans Wake or I Have Seen Monsters, these were done more or less as a diversion, as an escape from other more pressing projects. Rather than diving in, I wanted to wade into these very uncertain waters first. There is no sprawling critical-biographical apparatus for interpreting Jolas' work. He provided that service to others, Joyce himself most preeminently, contributing an essay to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a critical anthology interpreting and defending Finnegans Wake as it was being written. It's fitting then, before we go further, to include a limerick by Joyce, written in celebration of Jolas’ book Mots-Déluge, which is as good a summation of this wonderfully obscure writer as any you'll find.
James Joyce: Versailles 1933 There's a genial young poetriarch Euge Who hollers with heartiness huge: Let sick souls sob for solace So the jeunes joy with Jolas Book your berths: Apres mot, le deluge! Eugene Jolas: Syntax des Baumes Der Goldbaum wächstwolkt in mein Blut. Ich steige funkelbirrend in das Lall. Die Blimmerwelt entschleierlüstert in den Brasenheinen, wo hymnowarrend floht die Lust und Träufelsegen schäumert gleiss. Arborsyntax The gilttree overcasts my blood. I climb waywardsparking into babble. The blatherworld unveils in brayzenings, where hymnward desire flows and spumebless showher radiant. Waldate Die Birchen silven paradiserisch. Weissengel wilken glitternd durch die Bremmen. Es ist so bügelisch im Irretum, im Wirrelum, Schwirreruhm. Ein Ursinn märchelt wundermant. Forestrestlessness The birches sylvan paradisical. Whiteangels willhelm beglittered through the laburnarium. It's so ironoppressive in delusion, in confusion, in whirligig effusion. An ursense tales wondrament.
I really enjoyed these! It's time to hunt down some more Jolas, it seems. Thank you.