Peter Handke’s Repetition1 (translated by Ralph Manheim) is narrated by Filip Kobal, who travels from Austria to Slovenia, then Yugoslavia, in search of his missing brother Gregor. Filip brings with him Gregor’s copybook, written in Slovenian, and tries to make sense of it despite his not knowing the language. This section of the novel records Filip’s memories of Gregor’s orchard and his attempts to read/translate the copybook:
My brother’s copybook dealt mostly with fruit growing. With the help of the dictionary, I managed to get the gist of it. Though the work of a man who was not yet twenty, it did not consist of lecture notes but was, rather, the record of a young scientist’s independent research. A second section was a kind of treatise, made up of reflections on the subject, and the end a catalogue of rules and suggestions. The whole was a student’s notes and a textbook in one.
Essentially, the book revolved around my brother’s experience of planting and improving apple trees in his own orchard at home. He spoke of suitable soil (“loose and rich,” “flat, slightly vaulted ground”), orientation (“east to west, but sheltered from the wind”), the best times for the various operations (often determined by the equinoxes or the rising of certain constellations, or by rural holidays).
I couldn’t help reading my brother’s observations on grafting and on transplanting young trees as in part a Bildungsroman. He had carried the young plants from the nursery to his garden “along with their earth” and arranged them in the same order as in the nursery, though much farther apart, because the branches of one tree should never touch those of another. He had woven the root branches into protective baskets before inserting them in their holes. The trees grown from seed on the spot had proved more resistant but also less fruitful than the transplants. Leafy crowns were advantageous, as they provided a roof under which more fruit would form. Branches that inclined toward the ground bore more fruit than those that soared skyward (though the fruit hanging higher up was less likely to rot). As for grafting, he used only branches pointing eastward. They were pencil-shaped and the cuts chamfered to let the rainwater run off. The cutting itself was done not with a blow but by pulling the knife through so the bark would remain intact. He had always chosen scions that had once borne fruit, “because otherwise we shall have worked not for a yield but for shade,” and he had never inserted a scion in a fork between two other scions, for, if he did, it would draw nourishment away from them. Of pruning, he wrote that the earlier he did it, the more “wood” he obtained; the later, the more “fruit”; the wood just “shot up,” while the fruit would “bow down.”
At the beginning of the copybook he explained that originally there had been only one tree in his orchard; it had run wild and bore no fruit. He had driven a spike into the bark at the spot that was freest from lichen; from the festering wound had sprung a shoot with one promising eye after another. The spike, his own invention, had been more like an auger—instead of hole-plugging dust, it produced shavings that could be blown out. (Beside the description was a drawing of a “Kobal auger.”)
But what made a deeper impression on me than such incidental pedagogic metaphors, such allusive meanings, were the concrete details, the mere mention of things which up until then had been only a jumble to me. The bast my brother used to tie his scion to the branch, the wood splint (not round but square) that held it straight, the pebbles that moderated the temperature of the soil at the roots and protected them from the groundwater, took on a radiance that held my attention. Thus a light fell on the orchard, which has been neglected since then and run wild like the tree with which it began, and in the manuscript I caught sight of a blue-bordered enclosure, where, confronted with the rich diversity of “my thing” (as my brother called his orchard), I gazed around and around as though I stood in my brother’s place at the center of it. “We shall not have worked for shade”—that was the battle cry which now, at the table beside the window, I shouted into the roaring of the torrent, as the black grouse in the corner of one eye and the white washbasin in the other swung across my field of vision like two intersecting pendulums.
Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimation—incomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiar—into an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire. My brother referred to certain of his activities, such as removing sterile shoots, as “blind work.” Possibly such translation transformed blind reading into sighted reading, an unseeing activity into intelligent work. It seemed to me that even my father, if he had come into the room, would have left his grumbling on the threshold and, at the sight of my sparkling translator’s eyes, expressed his satisfaction with his son: “Yes, that is his game!”
Even where in the second part of his copybook my brother passed from his particular orchard to a general discussion of different varieties of apple, it was his own trees that appeared to me; where he was merely describing a method, I continued to read a story about a place and its hero; and it was also to them that the concluding remarks addressed to every fruit grower referred, to the effect that in a “thing” so closely akin to wisdom there could be neither professors nor students, and that what mattered most in fruit growing was “the master’s presence.”
These words—”Undoubtedly, the words owed some of their power to the fact that I did not immediately understand them but had to translate them, not from a foreign language into my own, but directly from an intimation—incomprehensible as much of the Slovene was to me, it seemed somehow familiar—into an image: into the orchard, a branch prop, a piece of wire.”—capture beautifully the elusive relationship (relationship?) between language and form-of-life. Intimation to image.
When I translate Genesis I cannot imagine afternoons in the Garden or sojourning with Abraham or standing beside the river with Jacob like Filip can imagine his brother and his brother’s orchard, yet but so it does feel somehow familiar because however distant the composition it describes my origins and the origins of my world. There’s a poem by Bialik about how an afternoon in a suburb is just like the afternoon when Abraham bound Isaac and reached out the knife to sacrifice him. The context and textual history of Genesis can be interesting, but Bialik’s way of reading, not unlike Pound’s “all ages are contemporaneous,”2 seems right to me.
Writing about translation turns out to be even harder than translating.
Finally, don’t miss Michael Carasik’s post on “the translator’s dilemma” and my interview with him some weeks ago.
Please do read Handke’s book, as well as Sebald’s essay about it, “Across the Border”. I’m happy to send the essay to anyone who wants it.
From Pound’s Spirit of Romance: “It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grand-children's contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham's bosom, or some more fitting receptacle. What we need is a literary scholarship, which will weigh Theocritus and Mr Yeats with one balance, and which will judge dull dead men as inexorably as dull writers of to-day, and will, with equity, give praise to beauty before referring to an almanack. Art is a joyous thing. Its happiness antedates even Whistler; apropos of which I would in all seriousness plead for a greater levity, a more befitting levity, in our study of the arts.”
Excellent insights. Thank you -