In the process of completing my psycho-analytically-oriented
novel BREAKUP UNDER ANALYSIS, a stand-alone part of DARLINGS &
MONSTERS tryptic not the once planned quartet, I thought it wouldn’t be such a
bad idea to re-view the novels I have been intimate with during my editing, translating, and publishing days or as instrument in that
endeavor; a couple dozen some truly noteworthy works it turns out, each of them
with a story of some kind, major minor, attached to its whelping, which is the
case with every book in which you have invested yourself, a novel’s worth of
experience in some instances: how you came to translate the book, whether you
were happy with the result; how I came to publish or edit it and what was
involved, in at least one case leading to one of the aorta’s of the Big Bright
City’s HEART OF DARKNESS. And what lasting effect these books have? On my or
reader’s or literature being – books do have effects and not only in childhood
and youth. The most unusual being the effect on downtown Manhattan Chinese
laundries of one of the two dozen!
Already at Oakwood School I wrote a
story that indicated that I chiefly wanted to be a servant to literature -
Anton Bruckner so grateful that
anyone would play his music that he paid the conductor - that is, an editor –
as I was then at Haverford Bryn Mawr with the Review and then with
Metamorphosis while free-lancing before getting my first job along that line at
Farrar, Straus - the occasional good story or fairy tale, that once a year
rarity, did not suffice for Hans Christian to put bread on the table.
HERE THE LIST, IN CHRONOLOGICAL
ORDER
THE PORTUGUESE WIFE by Robert Musil.
I cut my translator’s teeth here and had the time to do the half a dozen drafts
of this part of a never completed Master’s thesis, and published the novella in
the third and final issue of Metamorphosis in 1964.
I don’t recall when it occurred to
me that maybe one ought not to write about a writer’s work unless one had translated it.
But I still think it is something devoutly to be wished for in the improvement
of literary journalism.
DEMIAN by Hermann Hesse
I translated in the early 6os for
Roger Klein at Harper & Row together with CAMENZIND and BENEATH THE WHEEL,
with friend Michael Lebeck, although Roger then wrote – I was in London with my
sister - that he’d taken out most of the 2nd Michael’s changes. Much
as a I care for DEMIAN (and quite a few other Hesse works) – DEMIAN’s
projections providing the first inkling of psychoanalysis -(Hesse wrote DEMIAN
while doing the Jungian species of that astounding procedure) and though I seem
to be regarded as responsible for the 60s through 70 Hesse wave because I
brought all these many Hesse titles to Farrar, Straus, I really was much more
of a Musil fellow, and still am, I have that ineradicable bloody scientific side and life would at the
very least have been differently adventurous if I had followed my inclination
to spend it in the company of animals in the wild instead of, a good part at
least, in the publishing jungles. In Alaska I met an Austrian wildlife scientist
who each summer went out find the “Urbeaver” – the original ten foot beasts who
maybe had survived the arctic cold in one of the many hot springs in that also
volcanic region, and who therefore spent a lot of time in the wild with animals
for company it was an inclination that hooked up to the way I had lived to some
extent as a child and also to my then
reading.
I came to Musil not via a literary
route but by way of my interest in physic, A. Mach! about whom Musil had
written a dissertation. Poetry needed to have that kind of precision! Later my
editing of a translation of a book on Quarks for Basic Books brought me back up
to snuff on sub-atomic particles and their quantum lives! Handke became so
interesting to me lifelong because he has that kind of precision, also in vague
matters – to be precisely vague! His knowledge of the German classics also
helped him on that score.
CAMENZIND
& BENEATH THE WHEEL had such an antiquated German style it created real
problems for me in translation, with DEMIAN
Hesse became far more elastic.
LEAVEAKING by Peter Weiss
was one of the two books, the other
was Peter Bichsel’s And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the
Milkman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bichsel
that my scouting Germany in 1964 for
Sam Lawrence got for him, during which time Uwe Johnson was helpful in advising
me on matters East German lit.
Peter Weiss became a friend. LEAVEKING in particular as well as its
successor FLUCHTPUNKT is hugely important to me, for its theme of the
difficulty of disattaching while achieving individuation. Peter survived in
exile in Sweden, as did Nelly Sachs.
But to tell you a bit about me &
Peter: in 1966 I was well advanced with a Vietnam War play entitled THE
COMMITTEE HEARING – some SDS types capture the war criminals Dean Rusk,
McNamara, etc. & conduct a televised trial on the basis of what a
historically trained scholar knows that criminals of that kind always create, a
huge paper trail of legal justifications for war, it had to exist and of course
it then turned out to exist, the Pentagon Papers, the sort of thing that will
convict under the glare of the T.V. klieg lights, the T.V. lens as super-ego
you might say. But when the great - at the time Peter - MARAT/SADE & THE
INVESTIGATION - told me he was working on a Vietnam War play of his own, I
dropped my piece at once, but to be disappointed by Peter’s black and white
piece that contained none of the contentiousness of the way the Vietnam War
played out in the United States as it was reflected in my THE COMMITTEE
HEARING.
Analytically speaking, I did not
want to be in competition with the “good father,” the position Peter occupied
in the firmament of my sentiments.
It was surprising that Peter’s prose
work was available to Sam at Atlantic Monthly Press, since Cornelia Schaefer
had acquired Marat/Sade for Atheneum.
THE THIRD BOOK ABOUT ACHIM by Uwe
Johnson
I had already interviewed Johnson, when Fred Jordan asked me to revise Ursule
Molinaro’s translation. The interview is with Suhrkamp now, but the translation
seems to have required further editing and was eventually published by Helen
Wolf at Harcourt Brace. Johnson’s first three novels SPECULATION ABOUT JAKOB,
ACHIM & TWO VIEWS are all hugely important for me, for their concreteness,
their economy but also because the way political contradictions, politics
infuses the language, I can’t think of a single American writer in whose
language anything of the kind has transpired, and now I am half as well badly read as I used to
be.
LEBENSLAEUFE/ CASE HISTORIES by
Alexander Kluge
What a way to do portraits! I can’t
think of anyone who has done anything similarly devastating of Americans, though
I think Norman Mailer certainly had the right instincts, the nose, to do so; there
is of course Mary McCarthy’s The Company she Keeps. Nothing like
Frankfurt School critical thinking training, is there?
I edited a fine Leila Vennewitz
translation for McGraw-Hill for a beautiful editor who it turned out had the
hots for me who, however, was all business, I was entirely obtuse until she
caressed my genitals at an American Book Awards ceremony cocktail party! What a
shame that I just didn’t ask her over to my apartment, for all these
superfluous lunches that she scheduled! I think she later went on to work for
Lord Weidenfeld’s firm.
The subject of editing, that
polishing , that conscientious last comparative look-through which is often all
that is needed of translations makes me reflect that Krishna Winston’s of
Handke MORAVIAN NIGHT would have much benefited from that effort.
NIGHT by Edgar Hilsenrath
is a Romanian concentration camp
novel,
that I did for Doubleday in one
month -100,000 words for about $ 2500 - on which I got married; the prose is
simplicity itself as is the dialogue.
Didn’t have time to do Edgar’s NAZI & THE BARBER, the more famous of
his books. Grim stuff.
THE IMPOSSIBLE PROOF by Hans Erich
Nossack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Erich_Nossack
was the first title I acquired while
at Farrar, Straus, and Straus did not like it, it didn’t ring his cash
register, but then went into at least one second printing. It’s an existential
favorite of mine, and became so also for a future friend, that great surprise,
the author Dick Kalich.
Nossack’s The D’Arthez Case
Farrar Straus did not ctd. with
Nossack after I left, but Joel Agee took up the slack with THE END
the kind of fire I myself once
observed from a distance when Bremerhaven went up in flames in 1944.
THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA T. by Christa
Wolf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Christa_T.
Uwe Johnson alerted me to Christa
Wolf and her The Divided Sky which did not do the trick for me –
Johnson’s Two Views does on the subject of divided East West Germany - whereas
I fell in love with Quest and Michael Hamburger alerted me to that
wonderful translator Christopher Middleton who was teaching in Texas at the
time.
Again F.S.G. did not keep up after I
left, Siegfried Unseld having succeeded in persuading me to become Suhrkamp rep
in the US for two unhappy years.
THE GOALIE’S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY
KICK by Peter Handke
I did not get to publish Handke’s
DER HAUSIERER (of which GOALIE is a direct and artistically logical outgrowth
and which I had signed up first for FSG) at Urizen Books. Partner Schulz felt
unappreciated by Handke who had seen through his dark side on first
acquaintance of Schulz directing some Handke plays at Chelsea Theater at B.A.M.
in 1971.
I should not that I then sought to
duplicate Handke’s ability to transpose the reader’s consciousness via the
linguistic sleight of hand of its initial paragraphs into the disassociated
state of mind of a paranoid schizophrenic – a linguistic matter Handke had
studied for this purpose, a state of mind that is refreshing for the reader! As
opposed to poor Bloch, and is the kind of thing that Wenders in his film failed
to achieve, if film is capable to have that kind of grammatical ability. I
thought of moments in my life where I had been seriously disassociated and it
took me a week to find the grammatical solution, and then none of my readers
got it until I pointed it out to them. Duh! Upon request, it’s the opening of a
still uncompleted novella, Death Watch.
BEAUTFUL DAYS by Franz Innerhofer
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Innerhofer_(Schriftsteller)
Innerhofer is one of two authors who
committed suicide, which will not come as that much of a surprise if you read
this beautiful book of yet another horrendous rural Austrian childhood. He came
to New York and visited Urizen Books and I took him to Barnabus Rex, our
shoebox of a bar, and it took some weeks for me to get out from under the
depression that I absorbed just by spending an hour or so in his presence.
Handke refused to give me a blurb because Innerhofer had remained the same
writer with his second book! Judging other writers by your own pride in not
repeating yourself is not the way to go, I don’t think, a tad too harsh!
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2014/05/beautiful-days-by-franz-innerhofer.html
LIFE OF THE AUTOMOBILE by Ilja
Ehrenburg is a hell of a lot of fun, that dreadful person but pretty good
translator whom I employed far too often Joachim Neugroeschel claimed to have
translated it from the Russian!
DETOUR by Michael Brodksy
Wedding Feast & Two Novellas by Michael Brodksy
Patricia Highsmith alerted Peter
Handke to Michael Brodsky and Handke sent him to me where he arrived with a
maroon satchel, and after he left I took a look at the first page of each of
the five manuscripts and knew that I had an author on the order of a Beckett.
And so I took extra care with the production, design and printing of the book
and did something I had never done before nor since. Michael and I went over
his manuscript page by page at my office, I think we did this on uninterrupted
Saturdays, and occasionally I suggested a metaphor for a lengthy passage. But
it proved difficult to buy Michael a cup of coffee! This was the kind of work
which justified the existence of Urizen Books.
Schulz was not keen on Brodsky so I
agreed to his tit for tat suggestion to do a book of Marvin Cohen’s
The
Inconvenience of Living
http://www.marvincohen.net/
who proved easier company than the
so very intense Michael, as do journalists.
STORY OF THE EYE by George Bataille
came to me via a most intense love affair with a dashing redhead; after the end
of the affair, my heart was broken once again, I had to find out what she meant
when she said “Let’s play Bataille!” and she did not mean fight!
This was a book with immediate
consequences in our downtown precinct, and is the one that benefited the
Chinese Laundries. I have a chapter in Darlings & Monster of some
extraordinary filming of Bataille being played
BLUE OF NOON translated by Harry Mathews
I brought along my friend Hannah, a
statuesque, extraordinarily beautiful sculptor of cunt art, to please translator
Harry Mathews who I happened to know had had a redheaded girlfriend of the same
type and there was that amazing moment
as we we were eating at the sidewalk café on Central Park South that Hannah
spotted a friend and ran and leapt up at him, clasping him around the waist with
her beautiful thighs! Harry was nicely non-plussed!
People do not believe me when I tell
them that I never made a pass at Hannah, but I didn’t, for the simple reason
that she would not stop talking about the painter who had broken her heart and
which is the sort of thing that will stanch my libidinous inclinations. Hannah
died young of breast cancer, most painful when the beautiful are so consumed. A
friend brought her to the publication party of Bataille’s THE STORY OF THE EYE,
at Mickey;s Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, that is how we met and so her meeting
the translator of BLUE OF NOON I guess has something right about that.
THE HANDICAPPER
The extraordinary Story that goes
with its editing is so long you will have to follow below link:
THE PLAGUE IN SIENNA by Erich
Wolfgang Skwara is beautiful work by an Austrian writer who has had the great
misfortune to be published in translation by Ariadne Press, cheapskate idiots
who don’t even send galleys to Publisher’s Weekly or Library Journal, do not
promote, do not render royalty statements. One of these days when back in
Riverside country I will sue the shit out of those professors!
Skwara’s ICE ON THE BRIDGE is not up
to his first novel but still interesting
but is the one instance where I
seriously came to dislike the book’s protagonist and then the author for being
a misogynist who seemed to go out of his way to hurt women emotionally.
WHEREBORN by Robert Schindel
is formally the weakest of the lot
but would have had a major reception if it had not been buried with Ariadne Press. It is fascinating on the subject of
Austro-German Jewish relations during the postwar period.
Josef Winkler’s book FLOWERS FOR
JEAN GENET made for a wonderful translation experience because the book make me
love Genet & his work
http://www.ariadnebooks.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=1572410213
It reads like a novel and is a
fitting title for the transition to the dozen or so non-fiction titles that I
edited and published and feel proudest of. I love Winkler’s work &
translated his long BUTTERCUP story that
has become a test for me for provinciality.
I can’t think of any novel that was offered
to me where I misjudged and turned down. Urizen had signed up Kathy Acker’s Blood
and Guts in Highschool, in part because she was a truly local author of the
downtown scene, but she pulled out and I had no regrets on the score, it was
amazing that partner Schulz actually agreed to publish a book he hated, and we
hated each other at that point, and she then failed to pay back her advance, and repeated the
routine with friend Jeffrey Steinberg of Stonehill, until she found the right
editor in friend Fred Jordan for whom I had done a lot of work and who was the
kind of Austrian who loved perversity the way
I think only the Austrians can.
I signed up Hubert Fichte’s DIE
PALLETTE at FSG but my colleagues did not care for the book once the
translation arrived. And I myself no longer much cared for it but one chapter
by the time we started Urizen Books.
HERE ARE TWO LINKS THAT PROVIDE
FURTHER BACK-GROUND
Michael Roloff September 2017
