Bring back the typewriter

It was difficult to write a long novel using a typewriter. You’d have to pound away in a fog of Tipp-Ex and carbon fumes. Occasionally people like Dylan Thomas would write something really good and then lose the only copy when drunk in a New York cab. Now anybody with a word processor and a creative writing degree is pounding out 100,000 mediocre words on a five-book deal. A typewriter was its own quality-assurance scheme: only those with something to say could be bothered mastering such cumbersome technology. We had fewer, shorter and better books. Don’t just bring back the typewriter, make it mandatory. (August 14, 2010. SMH Spectrum)

The shortlisted authors are:

• Matthew Lamb for Down to the River (a formally experimental novel about a man who returns to the rural Australian town of his childhood)
• Nikki McWatters for The Desert of Paradise (a memoir: the tale of a young rock-band groupie in Australia during the 1980s)
• Noel Mengel for RPM (a novel about a young man coming of age in rural QLD for whom music is both a comfort and a dream of escape)

Of course, the Emerging Author panel – although I think it’s definitely one of the most important awards – is only one among a suite of categories. You can view the whole list at the QPLA website here. Some highlights – personal and readerly – include the shortlisting of writers like Krissy Kneen for her memoir, Affection, Mark Tredinnick for The Blue Plateau, and Mary-Rose MacColl for The Birth Wars, all in the non-fiction category (Mary Rose’s book is also shortlisted in the ‘Advancing Public Debate’ category). It’s AWFUL when two or more people you adore and admire are up against each other – I can’t look!

Steven Lang has been shortlisted in a field made up of some of the strongest of Australia’s male writers, for his novel 88 Lines About 44 Women. It seems highly unlikely he’ll beat out Coetzee, Carey, Miller and Castro for the gong, but it’s an impressive field to be listed with and a wonderful recognition of Lang’s second novel. Although each of the novels on the shortlist is arguably a deserving piece of work, I’m once again bemused that no fiction by female authors was considered of equal merit. Of course, I wouldn’t want to see a work included just because it was by a woman, but it seems to me that far too often literary awards are (still) dominated by male authors. Can men really be (on average/on the whole) better writers than women, or is ‘our’ definition of good writing – writing of literary merit – still subtly but insidiously informed by outdated masculinist notions of literature?

Richard Yaxley gets a shortlisting for his (self-published!) young adult fiction, Drink the Air, as do the power duo of Justine Larbalestier (Liar) and Scott Westerfeld (Leviathan). A really exciting YA shortlist: I don’t envy the judges who had to weigh up the relative merits of these wonderful novels.

I’m also delighted to see Peter Boyle’s book of poetry, Apocrypha, on the shortlist alongside Jennifer Maiden (Pirate Rain), Les Murray (Taller When Prone) and Maria Takolander (Ghostly Subjects). Boyle’s collection is a surprising and inventive book, something akin to Calvino’s Invisible Cities in its playful reimagining of the cities and citizens of the past. I’ve just been reading Apocrypha, and will no doubt have more to say on it soon, but in the meantime here’s one of his earlier poems, from the simply magnificent book of poems Museum of Space. This poem (‘Of Poetry’) is one of Boyle’s ars poetica – a wonderful tradition in which poets reflect on the art of poetry. Early examples from Horace and Aristotle are part of a long-lived tradition of both critical and playful attempts to describe the poet’s craft. Boyle’s is at once typical of the form, and a fresh vision. I particularly love the imagery of the 2nd and 3rd lines, which both suggests a poem with two hands, and a poem as open-handed.

Of poetry

Great poems are often extraordinarily simple.
They carry their openness
with both hands.
If there is a metaphor lounging in a doorway
they step briskly past.
The boom of generals
and presidents with their rhetoric manuals
will go on sowing the wind.

The great poems are distrustful of speech.
Quietly,
like someone very old
who has only a few hours left of human time,
they gaze into the faces around them –
one by one
they kiss love into our mouths.

Outside my office there is a beautiful, distracting swathe of native bushland. I’ve had many visitors in my office, most of them human, but occasionally some creature wanders in. A glorious green tree snake spent a few days curled up between the window and the screens, rock wallabies and koalas peer in, and every now and then I see a pair of tawny frogmouths trying to pretend they’re parts of the trees they are roosting on.

This is a popular Owl, or tetradrachm, commonly dated from c449 - 413 BCE. It's probably the type of coin Roosevelt is reputed to have carried in his pocket.

Symbolically, they often appear as wise but ominous figures – guardians in the darkness, protectors. The ancient Greeks associated them with the Goddess Athena – owls were her favourite birds – and consequently with wisdom. The Athene Noctua (Little Owl) were a protected and revered species of the ancient world, and reputedly roosted in large numbers in the Acropolis. Throughout antiquity, Athena and her companion owl were a symbol of the city. Athenian silver coins usually showed a head of the goddess facing right on the obverse and an owl on the reverse, under a sprig of olive and a crescent moon (the crescent moon only appears on Athenian coins after the Battle of Salamis in September, 480 BC). The slang word for the tetradrachm was owl. a tetradrachm is a fairly large sum of money, so ‘owls’ were mostly used in trade or large-scale transactions, whereas obols were more common in daily shopping at the agora.  The letters going down the right-hand side of the coin are alpha, theta, and epsilon. The phrase indicated, in genitive case, is ‘Of the Athenians’.

In English literature, the owl is often associated with death, by virtue of its nocturnal nature, perhaps, or its reputation as a hunter. There are some wonderful poems that feature owls, including Ted Hughes’ ‘The Owl’, Wordsworth’s , Tennyson’s ‘The Owl’. And novels and short stories innumerable in which owls feature. I still remember the vividness of the owls and owl imagery in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service: the dinner plates and the painting, of course, but also the paper owls in the dust of the attic, the stuffed owl murdered by Bertram, the sounds of their cries in the darkness.

She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.

I loved this novel as a little girl, perhaps particularly because it’s related to the Welsh tale of Blodeuwedd: an old story, and one of those my father told me many times when I was very small. Blodeuwedd is a woman made of flowers – broom, meadowsweet and oak – created to be the bride of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Llew is under a curse set on him by his mother, Arianrhod: he can never marry a human bride. It’s a longish, complex but gorgeous story – the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi (Math ab Mathonwy), at the end of which Bloduewedd is cursed by Llew’s uncle, Gwydion, one of her creators. He says:

I will release you in the shape of a bird. Because of the shame that you have wrought upon Lleu Llaw Gyffes, you will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day ever again, and that [will be] because of enmity between you and all[other] birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you wherever they find you. And you will not loose your name – that will always be “Bloddeuwedd”.

Blodeuwedd means owl in the language of today. And it is because of that there is hostility between birds and owls, and the owl is still known as Blodeuwedd.

[This quote is from the translation by Medieval Scholar Will Parker, from Ifor Williams' Pedeir Keinc Y Mabinogi. The name Blodeuwedd (blodeu 'flower' + (g)wedd 'face, apsect') differs slightly from her baptismal name Blodeuedd, which is simply the plural of blodeu/flowers).]

There’s also a whole series of books – Guardians of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky, about the adventures of the Barn Owl, Soren. And who could forget the narrative charm of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ by Edward Lear, or the delightfully ironic mispellings of Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend and neighbour, Owl (or should that be Wol)?

One of my favourite short poems featuring an owl is Alice Oswald’s:

OWL

by Alice Oswald

last night at the joint of dawn,
an owl’s call opened the darkness

miles away, more than a world beyond this room

and immediately I was in the woods again,
poised, seeing my eyes seen,
hearing my listening heard

under a huge tree improvised by fear

dead brush falling then a star
straight through to God
founded and fixed the wood

then out, until it touched the town’s lights,
an owl elsewhere swelled and questioned
twice, like you light lean and strike
two matches in the wind.

I’d like to write a story about owls. Every now and then they crop up in my morning writing, in various guises. Today, they showed up in the work in progress/novel Dying in the First Person. This is Samuel:

I heard the train come up the valley. The soft, ghostly mourning cry and then the reply of an owl, close by. I slipped out of bed and went to the window, conscious that I was naked, touching the floorboards with my newborn’s milk-white feet. I parted the curtains just a little as the owl sounded again. Nearer still. And then it dropped and scudded across the clearing. It’s body heavy and slow, its wings dropping and rising like oars that must work to push aside the air. God is a bird, I thought, plowing the air of the forest. God is an owl: dark-eyed and violent, with pale feathers riffling on his breast as he hunts.

I like to use the word isumatug. It’s of eastern Arctic Eskimo dialect and refers to the storyteller, meaning ‘the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.’ I think that’s the writer’s job. It’s not to be brilliant, or to be the person who always knows, but … to be the one who recognizes the patterns that remind us of our obligations and our dreams.

'Arctic Dreams' by Robin Eschner

It’s a slim volume, full of poems of vigour, wit, and easy intelligence. Easy in the sense that her poems do not strut: the poet’s intelligence, her interest in history and ideas, is worn easily, gracefully.

The book includes a series of poems informed by historical figures: Chopin, Darwin, Weil, the Croatian naive art painter Ivan Generalić. There are also poems that imaginatively and perhaps critically engage with other stories: ‘Imaginary Prisons’ is a sustained meditation bringing together the narrative of Sleeping Beauty, and the imagined prisons of Battista Piranesi.

Her poetry is muscular and musical; she places the words on the page just so. The lines are pressurised, releasing steam from the compression of image and idea, movement and moment. She employs the arts of the poet with sharp grace. The lines flow across the page, the words often seem perfectly-chosen in terms of meaning, intimation, sound and rhythm.

My favourite poem so far is ‘Darwin in 1881′ – no surprise, as I’m a bit of a Darwin fan. In this elegant poem, Schnackenberg brings together with details of the late life of Darwin with Ovid’s Metamorphois and Shakespeare’s Prospero. Darwin appears to have had a long-standing interest in both Ovid’s work and The Tempest. Both Prospero – the fictional seventeenth-century magician – and Darwin, the real scientist – travelled to the islands – magical places – where they had visions of the metamophosing of living creatures while looking backward into “the dark backward and abysm of time” (Tempest: Act 1: Scene 2). As Schnackenber observes, both created tempests with their books, and expressed a desire to throw their works overboard. Both withdrew from the public world- the world of politics – into the seclusion of their studies, their homes.

‘Darwin in 1881′ is a long, eloquent poem, replete with the kind of images and the kind of seemingly seamless control of language’s meaning and texture that take my breath away with their sense of rightness, proportion and grace.

Darwin in 1881
by Gretrud Schnackenberg

Sleepless as Prospero back in his bedroom
In Milan, with all his miracles
Reduced to sailors’ tales,
He sits up in the dark. The islands loom.
His seasickness upwells,
Silence creeps by in memory as it crept
By him on water, while the sailors slept,
From broken eggs and vacant tortoise shells.
His voyage around the cape of middle age
Comes, with a feat of sight, to a close,
The same way Prospero’s
Ended before he left the stage
To be led home across the blue-white sea,
When he had spoken of the clouds and globe,
Breaking his wand, and taking off his robe:
Knowledge increases unreality.

He quickly dresses.
Form wavers like his shadow on the stair
As he descends, in need of air
To cure his dizziness,
Down past the shipsunk emptiness
Of grownup children’s rooms and hallways where
The family portraits blindly stare,
All haunted by each other’s likenesses.

Outside, the orchard and a piece of moon
Are islands, he an island as he walks,
Brushing against weed stalks.
By hook and plume
The seeds gathering on his trouser legs
Are archipelagoes, like nests he sees
Shadowed in branching, ramifying trees,
Each with unique expressions in its eggs.
Different islands conjure
Different beings; different beings call
From different isles. And after all
His scrutiny of Nature
All he can see
Is how it will grow small, fade, disappear,
A coastline fading from a traveler
Aboard a survey ship. Slowly,
As coasts depart,
Nature had left behind a naturalist
Bound for a place where species don’t exist,
Where no emergence has a counterpart.

He’s heard from friends
About the other night, the banquet hall
Ringing with bravos—like a curtain call,
He thinks, when the performance ends,
Failing to summon from the wings
An actor who had lost his taste for verse,
Having beheld, in larger theaters,
Much greater banquet-vanishings
Without the quaint device and thunderclap
Required in Act 3.
He wrote, Let your indulgence set me free,
To the Academy, and took a nap
Beneath a London Daily tent,
Then puttered on his hothouse walk
Watching his orchids beautifully stalk
Their unreturning paths, where each descendant
Is the last—
Their inner staircases
Haunted by vanished insect faces
So tiny, so intolerably vast.
And, while they gave his proxy the award,
He dined in Downe and stayed up rather late
For backgammon with his beloved mate
Who reads his books and is, quite frankly, bored.

Now, done with beetle jaws and beaks of gulls
And bivalve hinges, now, utterly done,
One miracle remains, and only one.
An ocean swell of sickness rushes, pulls,
He leans against the fence
And lights a cigarette and deeply draws,
Done with fixed laws,
Done with experiments
Within his greenhouse heaven where
His offspring, Frank, for half the afternoon
Played, like an awkward angel, his bassoon
Into the humid air
So he could tell
If sound would make a Venus’s-Flytrap close.
And, done for good with scientific prose,
That raging hell
Of tortured grammars writhing on their stakes,

He’d turned to his memoirs, chuckling to write
About his boyhood in an upright
Home: a boy preferring gartersnakes
To schoolwork, a lazy, strutting liar
Who quite provoked her aggravated look,
Shushed in the drawingroom behind her book,
His bossy sister itching with desire
To tattletale—yes, that was good.
But even then, much like the conjurer
Grown cranky with impatience to abjure
All his gigantic works and livelihood
In order to immerse
Himself in tales where he could be the man
In Once upon a time there was a man,

He’d quite by chance beheld the universe:
A disregarded game of chess
Between two love-dazed heirs
Who fiddle with the tiny pairs
Of statues in their hands, while numberless
Abstract unseen
Combinings on the silent board remain
Unplayed forever when they leave the game
To turn, themselves, into a king and queen.
Now, like the coming day,
Inhaled smoke illuminates his nerves.
He turns, taking the sandwalk as it curves
Back to the yard, the house, the entrance way
Where, not to waken her,

He softly shuts the door,
And leans against it for a spell before
He climbs the stairs, holding the banister,
Up to their room: there
Emma sleeps, moored
In illusion, blown past the storm he conjured
With his book, into a harbor
Where it all comes clear,
Where island beings leap from shape to shape
As to escape
Their terrifying turns to disappear.
He lies down on the quilt,
He lies down like a fabulous-headed
Fossil in a vanished riverbed,
In ocean-drifts, in canyon floors, in silt,
In lime, in deepening blue ice,
In cliffs obscured as clouds gather and float;
He lies down in his boots and overcoat,
And shuts his eyes.

Secondly, few things can compare to a morning that begins with a poached egg whose yolk spills silkenly at the touch of the knife, or a soft-boiled egg served with slim, buttery fingers of toast.

If you want something more indulgent, you might like to try a chaud-froid d’oeuf. Made famous by Alain Passard at l’Arpege, it is sometimes called l’Arpege d’oeuf. The recipe below is for one (sometimes, you really do need to eat alone). If you multiply the ingredients, and can successfully balance your armada of eggs in the pan, try serving them as an amuse-bouche for understanding friends.

Ingredients:

• 1 free range egg
• 1 dollop of maple syrup
• 1 tablespoon of cream or, preferably, creme fraiche
• 1 pinch of quatre epice (A French spice mix: nutmeg, ginger, cloves, white pepper)
• ½ teaspoon of sherry vinegar
• a teeny sprinkle of finely chopped chives
• 2 pinches salt
• fresh, black pepper

Preparation:

Neatly slice off the top of the egg and pour out the egg. You will probably need an egg-topper for this, and a nice sharp one. The French invented the guillotine: a good egg-topper is just as sharp. Be sure to place the bowl for collection of the white beneath the egg, and execute your victims swiftly.

Reserve the whites for some guilt-free egg-white omelette if you’re a purist, meringue if you’re more of an indulger, or to stiffen your mohawk. Some recipes recommend rinsing and drying out the shell before returning the yolk: you’ll need to have slim fingers and a light touch. Adorn the yolk, in the shell, with a light pinch of salt and freshly-crushed pepper.

In a separate bowl, whip the creme fraiche/cream with the sherry vinegar and a wee pinch of salt until stiff peaks form.

Lightly poach the egg yolks by floating the eggshells in very lightly simmering water for about two minutes. This is the tricky bit. Unlike poaching whole eggs loose in the water, you will want to use a shallow pot or pan and keep the water at a very low simmer so as not to tip your yolk-sailor into the sea.

Remove your poached yolks from the heat, and sprinkle with the chives.

Top up the shell with the whipped cream and drizzle a slurp of maple syrup over the top.

Serve in the eggshell, in a polished silver cup with a long-handled teaspoon and some Edith Piaf on the stereo. Best eaten by plunging your spoon deep into the shell, rupturing the buried yolk so that it wells up into the salty airiness of the creme fraiche.

If you have friends to share your eggs, you can always indulge yourself even further with a bad joke, borrowed from The West Wing:

Margaret: Do you know why they only eat one egg for breakfast in France?
Leo: Why?
Margaret: Because in France, one egg is an ‘oeuf’

Grossman is passionate about the perceived handmaiden status of translators and translation in the literary field and, for the most part, her observations about the lack of visibility and respect translators are afforded, and the relative dearth of translations of non-English literature into English (the usual statistic quoted, and which Grossman also gives, is that only 3% of works published in English originated were originally published in other languages).

Grossman work has focused on Spanish to English translation: she has created award-winning translations of contemporary Spanish works, notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maria Vargas Llosa, Jaime Manrique, Mayra Mantaro and Julián Ríos. She also worked on a translation of the sixteenth-century classic of Spanish literature: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Her translation of Quixote is strikingly contemporary, and complemented by a wonderful labyrinth of footnotes that enrich the experience of reading.

Martin Amis once quipped, in The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 that:

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull. … When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 – the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.

Grossman’s translation is readable, and even grants the reader the kind of clarity of access to the world of Cervantes’s novel that can only come from reading the work alongside someone who assiduously points out the intertextual and cultural references a non-Spanish, non-sixteenth-century reader might be unaware of, without attempting to smooth over or justify the many oddities and confusions, contradictions and – dare one say it? – inconsistencies contained in this voluminous romp of a novel.

In her introduction to Don Quixote, Edith does not do the usual things. She does not justify the translation and publication of a new English-language version of Don Quixote, nor does she articulate the ways in which her own translation differs from, or improves upon, those that have come before.  Rather, her note is an introduction to her philosophy in regard to translating a classical work, which includes, essentially, the necessity of translating the work not only into English (that is, across languages) but also into the twenty-first century (across time).

In Why Translation Matters, Grossman mounts a spirited defence of her craft. Sometimes it seems as though she is duelling with ghosts of her own imagining – straw men – but at other times, the enemies of the translator she enumerates are many, and varied, and take on human flesh. Reviewers get a serve for their insensitivity to the translator’s impact on the reviewable aspects of a work, commissioning editors for failing to solicit enough translations, or pay the translator a respectable fee, some academics for insisting on works being taught only in their original languages (that anyone would argue for such a thing was a revelation to me), and so on.

Grossman argues passionately against the laziness of reviewers who, for the most part she argues, do not even acknowledge when a work under review is a translation or, if they do, rarely do more than cast a single sentence into the review, perhaps using the dreaded adjective ‘seamless’ or ‘able’. Grossman takes great pains to point out the problems with these appellations, and to propose that a critical vocabulary is required for speaking about translation that doesn’t ignore the translator’s role in bringing a work across from another language, and bemoans the inability of most reviewers to critically evaluate a work in translation.

At one stage, for example, she rails against the way that reviewers of works in translation speak about the ‘style and language’ as if the style is attributable solely to the original author. Grossman argues that the ‘style and language’ of a translation are that of the translator, not of the “original author”. I have two responses to this: one to quibble, and one to concur.

First, to concur: it seems to me that this is a similar gripe to the one I have of reviews of films based on novels, where the film reviewer insists on crediting the director, or filmmaker, with having created the story and characters his work depicts. Certainly, the filmmaker has created a version of these elements of the novel adapted, but the basic elements are usually lifted directly from the novel, and not out of the filmmakers imagination.

Second, a quibble. It seems to me that while it isn’t true to argue that the style and language of a translated work are not easily ascribable to the writer (I eschew Grossman’s term ‘original writer’ and ‘second writer’: it seems to me more appropriate to stick with the terms we have, and insist on the necessity and dignity of both roles), it is equally untrue to argue that the style is attributable to the translator. Instead, it seems to me, the style is the result of a delicate and often at least partly intuitive negotiation between the original author and the translator: an amalgam, or concert, of voices joined in song. Grossman herself writes, in a passage about the notoriously difficult first line of Don Quixote, that she chose the syntax that ‘felt right’ in the end. Hardly an argument for an intellectual or aesthetic assertion of the translator’s artistry, though a valid and important recognition of the role familiarity, intuition and linguistic flexibility play in the laying down of a line.

Grossman’s translation of the first line of Don Quixote is:

Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

You can make your own comparisons with those of Walter Starkie:

At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen who are wont to keep a lance in the rack, an old buckler, a lean horse and a swift greyhound.

and Motteux:

At a certain village of La Mancha, which I shall not name, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen who are never without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound.

The Spanish is:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

For the most part, Why Translation Matters is a fascinating insight into the grievances, and the craft, of an intelligent, passionate and fascinating professional. But at other times … well, at other times it seems defensive, arrogant, and unnecessarily aggrieved. Or, perhaps, it is just that despite my sympathy for the overall thrust of Grossman’s argument, there are times when her arguments seem to me to be weakly constructed, times when I would like to ask her to be more precise.

For example, at one point Grossman writes:

But what never should be forgotten or overlooked is the obvious fact that what we read in a translation is the translator’s writing. The inspiration is the original work, certainly …

I got quite cross at Grossman here, or, rather, frustrated. What Grossman overlooks, or refuses to acknowledge, is that the noun ‘writing’ in the first sentence is not reducible to the level of the sentence, of word choice, syntax, rhyme and rhythm in poetry, etc. As complex and essential as these elements of craft are to writing (both as noun and verb), writing also includes theme, story, character, structure – to name just a few – and translators, no matter how interventionist or insensitive (and Grossman, I want to be clear, is rarely an insensitive translator, though she is sometimes quite invasive, as most translators are, and perhaps must be), rarely if ever tamper with these larger elements of a work in translation. I was frustrated by Grossman’s attempt to inflate the role of the translator at the expense of the writer: why not be satisfied with a more modest claim that is, at once, more accurate and more defensible? Why not stick to the claim that the style, or voice, in a translated work is largely the province of the translator? Why insist on the larger, more (implicitly) holistic, and more inaccurate claim that the whole work is that of the translator, ‘inspired’ by that of the author?

Perhaps, in one sense, Grossman is trying to be accurate in her use of the term inspired, or at least classically, etymologically accurate.

The word inspiration comes into English from the Latin noun inspiratio and from the verb inspirare. “Inspirare” is a compound term resulting from the latin prefix “in” (inside, into) and the verb “spirare” (to breathe). “Inspirare” meant originally to breathe in or inhale.

In post-Augustan Rome “inspirare” became to mean “to breathe deeply” and assumed also the figurative sense of “to instill [something] in the heart or in the mind of someone”. It is this later sense of the word that gets carried across in the idea of artistic inspiration. When Homer invokes the muse at the beginning of The Iliad, it is so that she – who was present at the historical events he is about to relate – may inform his account with her more truthful, more accurate one. The Muses were often invoked at or near the beginning of an ancient epic poem or classical Greek hymn – partly as a kind of reassurance that the narrative was not created by the weak, mortal, limited human, but was received from an ahistorical, immortal creature – a witness who spoke truly of the events. Homer, in this sense, can be understood as being conscious of, or at least paying lip-service to, his role as a mere vessel for the words of the muse: she breathes into, or through, him the words he then writes. In the Fagles translation the poet begins:

Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaens countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving towards its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles

Elsewhere in the book, Grossman has an entertaining, if slightly bemusing, rant about the fact that her UK editors wanted to anglicise her American translation of Quixote: translating the American spelling into UK spelling, and occasionally (she doesn’t give examples, so I’m not sure how extensive the requested changes were) requesting, or requiring, changes to syntax.

Her resistance to this process of transatlantic translation bemused me. As a non-American writer, I’ve often been privy to the distress of non-American writers having their work published in North America, and the consequent requirements for Americanising (Americanizing?) the text. And, to be honest, I’ve often been sympathetic to their resistance to such shifts, particularly when the text in question is about non-American characters, set in non-American cities, and/or featuring non-American dialogue. It seems odd, to me, to ask that an Australian character be asked to use the term SUV or truck, when the Australian word ‘ute’ (and the object it relates to) is not really equivalent. As Walter Benjamin argues, the German brot and the French pain “intend the same object but the modes of intention are note the same,” and, as Michael Wood observes, even this notion is problematic since French bread and German bread are quite different: the intention (The signified/the thing itself) is not the same for a German speaker as it might be for a French speaker.

And yet, my surprise at Grossman’s rejection of her UK publishers requests is less to do with the battle between various, competing forms of English, and the underlying histories of colonialism that might be understood to inform such tensions, as to do with the fact that, as a translator, she does not stop to consider the irony of her resistance.

Firstly, the work in question – Don Quixote -  was not originally written in American English, or idiom, but in sixteenth-century Spanish, and it seems to me to be odd to insist on the American spelling and idiom when there is no evidence for its necessity, or essential relation to the original. Does Grossman want to insist that there is some essential, necessary quality of Americanness in the translation? I don’t know.

Secondly, in some sense, what she is being asked to agree to is a translation, from the Spanish, via the American translation, into British. That is, in the final translational transaction, from one regional dialect into another. Why would a translator, who is at pains elsewhere in her book to resist the hierarchisation of langugages, resist such a thing? Privilege one language, or one dialect, over another? There is some suggestion in Grossman’s work that the resistance is partly political: a resistance to the colonial mother country’s publisher’s insistence on the mother-tongue, but this is a bit of a red herring, surely. Anyone with an even passing awareness of the various, competing dialects of English in the contemporary world is aware that American spelling and grammar have become dominant in the contemporary world.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes (or, rather, Anscombe translates):

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a maze of new boroughs with straight, regular streets and uniform houses.

In some sense, if we think of English as ‘our language’ in this context, American, (and Australian, and New Zealand English, and Canadian, etc), are boroughs within the broader city that include some districts of the ‘old cities’ from which our languages evolved, and some of those crisp new streets. When we cross this ancient city, moving through the ordered districts into and through the Calvino-esque centre, we travel through various dialects, various histories of our shared language, but we can never arrive at a pure source: the old city has been cannibalised, its towers torn down and the bricks and glass used to construct new churches and squares, new blocs and streets. To insist on the primacy of one dialect, particularly outside of its neighbourhood, is, it seems to me, a kind of foolishness. An inconsiderate arrogance. The language of my streets is my language, and the language of your streets is yours, and if you want to walk the streets of my language, and converse with the natives, it helps to speak the local patois – out of respect as much as out of a need to communicate – just as it helps for me to learn a little of yours when I watch your TV, or read imported books, or listen to you speak.

Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about Charlotte Wood’s novel The Submerged Cathedral. It’s not her most recent book, but I returned to it after finding a copy during one of those days when you’re trawling the bookshelf looking for something to inspire you: to remind you why you read, and write.

Charlotte is a wonderful writer, and this novel – her second – is far more than the sum of its parts. Certainly the kind of book that reminds me of the power and potential of good writing.

The story is told in sections, with large gaps of time and space between them. A kind of fractured narrative, the novel is held together by strong undercurrents of narrative connection and emotion, by the sense of suppressed and thwarted desires in the main characters, Martin and Jocelyn – for each other, for the land, for spiritual connection – and through a symbolic and physical exploration of landscape. The book is, in one sense, a love story. And in some ways the bones of the plot are simple enough: boy and girl meet, are pulled apart by time and circumstance and … meet again. But there is, of course, far more to this story of desire and longing than such a reduction allows. The novel includes a series of surprising twists, shifts in place, time and situation that startle the reader, while drawing you further in. There is a sharp, deft honesty to the writing, particularly about the failings of love, of people, of our essential frailty. Some of the most memorable moments in the book are of shocking disappointments and betrayals: the casual cruelty of the wrong word, the shift from tenderness to something far less comfortable (“I we were married I could forbid you” Martin says to Jocelyn at one point), the sharp sting of a child slapping his mother in the Alhambra.

But one of the things that most interested me was the beauty and subtlety of the nets of imagery in the novel, particularly the imagery of plants, gardens and gardening, and the ways those images are connected to one of the other webs of imagery in the novel: those of religious faith and religious architecture (both virtual and actual).

One of the recurring images in this book is that of the garden; Jocelyn, while living with Martin on the Pittwater in the 1960s, imagines a magnificent garden of wild Australian plants:

She’s telling him things he doesn’t know, but there’s something familiar in her halting words – and then he recognises it. The notion of the garden. It’s his own five year-old’s epiphany, and the root of his connection to her: they can both see beyond what it is.

She repeats the plant names like prayers. Eucalyptus macrocarpa. Acacia longifolia. Telopea speciossima, Doryphora sassafras, Banksia spinulosa. They look out at the black sea and he listens to her laying down the bones of her half-formed, holy, fantastical plan (37).

The garden represents both their relation to each other, and their inability to connect. Soon, partly through an inability to break free of her sister’s loving but malevolent neediness, Jocelyn is drawn away from her early epiphany about the garden, away from Martin and their love for each other. This imagery of the garden is connected to other themes in the novel, such as faith, and to other gardens, particularly the Biblical gardens (both Eden and Gethsemane). The religious language of the quote above (with its use of words like epiphany, holy, prayers) is echoed throughout the narrative, particularly when Jocelyn visits some of the churches of Europe, and when Martin joins a religious order, but also in the writing about Jocelyn and Martin’s relationship with each other: “In a garden at night a choice is made. To escape, or to continue. Reason, or faith” (263).

The age-old tension between faith and reason seems essential to the book: a key concern both of its characters, and, perhaps, the author. Most overtly, Martin’s faith in his work as a doctor, his belief in his ability to heal (powerfully drawn when he perhaps mistakenly believes he heals a bird as a child), is shattered: later he attempts to redress this rupture by seeking out faith in God.

The tension or ironic affection between faith and reason have been of interest to moral, and particularly religious, philosophers since at least the Classical Period, when Plato and later Aristotle attempted to expound the principles of religious thinking that could function as an endpoint for the regression of explanation (if not of Forms). Plato’s notion of the Forms is crucial to their work in this area, particularly the notion of the Form of Good: the originary Form of which all else is an imitation, or an interpretation. That is, the bedrock on which faith can rest without recourse to reason.

Perhaps my favourite thinker/writer on the question of faith and reason is the fourth-century scholar St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who believed that true philosophy must include both faith and reason, and that reason was never theologically neutral. While the Socratic dictum insisted that “Virtue is knowledge,” and that knowledge leads to truth, Augustine maintained – partly as a result of reflection on his own moral struggles -  that knowledge, or an appeal to reason, does not automatically produce goodness. Instead, according to Augustine, “Faith goes before; understanding follows after.”

Augustine wrote that intellectual inquiry into faith was to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To have faith, for Augustine, was “to think with assent” (credere est assensione cogitare), an act of the intellect determined not by reason, necessarily, but by will.

Augustine admired the work of the Platonists, whowrote so carefully and thoughtfully about the causes of things, but were also interested in the method of acquiring knowledge, and on how we might discern the cause of the organised universe – of life – itself. As a later Catholic theologian writes:

The cogitatio, that quest, that always renewed inquiry of the unsatisfied believer, is not an optional feature of faith; it is an intrinsic element of which the coexistence with a categorical assensus properly constitutes the credere, as much by opposition to the scire as to the dubitare (Marie-Dominique Chenu quoted in Contemplation and Incarnation)

[cogitatio: thinking, reason - assensus: approval/agreement/assent  - credere: to believe/to think - scire: knowledge or understanding - dubitare:doubt]

This sense of the application of reason, or thinking, to the practice of faith as a journey – a quest – can be productively read against Wood’s novel. Many novels, some might even say all novels, have some elements of the quest within them. In Wood’s novel, the quest of the characters to love and be with each other is underpinned by their individual quests to reconcile faith (the logic of the heart) with reason (the logic of the  mind).

Of course, Charlotte’s book is not a treatise, and while these are the connections and ideas I was prompted to reconsider after reading her book, she is not such a clumsy writer as to fall into didacticism. Her characters lives are scored and circumscribed by the tension between faith and reason, but she is not the kind of writer who pushes these themes onto the page, or into the mouths and minds of her characters. And it is not always a Christian, or even a religious, faith that troubles them. It is also the tension between reason and faith in themselves, in their capacities as humans, as sister and doctor, as well as reason and faith in love, reason and faith in each other.

Some of this is played out in the landscape of gardens: gardens that occur naturally, and gardens cultivated and lived in by the various characters of the novel. In one sense, a reading that focuses on the tensions and connections between faith and reason in the novel, could align these tensions with the metaphors of the garden and the natural landscape and flora, with faith most aligned with native or wild landscapes and flora, and reason with the practice of gardening. Crucially, then, Jocelyn’s epiphanic dream of a native garden, and her late attempts to create an earthly mirror of that vision, bring these two impulses or practices into a productive, if not peaceful, relation. As Wood writes:

A garden is not a gentle place (187)

Gardens, particularly non-native and symbolic/mythic gardens, are contrasted with the natural landscape and with native gardens: metaphors perhaps for the passionate love that Jocelyn and Martin initially enjoy in the relatively untamed natural environment of the Pittwater, and later, in the Blue Mountains garden where Jocelyn’s mother’s garden wilts, and the dog shits in full view of the house. The post-colonial gardens of Jocelyn’s Blue Mountains home, with its languishing introduced species, reflects the ways their love is interrupted and restricted through family obligations, the moral judgment of the times and so on.

Events lead to the two being separated and it is many years before Jocelyn builds the garden she imagines during that early idyll. The site she chooses is connected to Martin,and to the grave of an unnamed child both feel drawn to. Jocelyn finally constructs the garden she imagined, through a labour of love, imagination and determination, though her first garden is partially destroyed by bushfire. This is foreshadowed by references, early in the novel, to banksias being consumed but also regenerated by fire, images that are, in turn, connected to the religious narratives of death and rebirth, particularly in Christianity. These images of the destroyed garden are connected to the Biblical story of Christ, and to the garden of Gethsemane.

Gethsemane is the garden in Jerusalem, where Christ and his disciples gathered to pray the night before his crucifixion. It is the site of Christ’s ‘agony in the garden’: the place where he experienced doubt and what we might interpret as a very human fear and trepidation regarding his upcoming torture and death. According to the Book of Luke, Jesus prays:

Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done (Luke 22:42).

Though he experiences doubt, Jesus finally sublimates his own will to that of his father, God. Both Martin and Jocelyn struggle with the force of their personal wills in the garden of the monastery, suffering their own agonies of self-doubt, determination, frustration and so on.

Gethsemane is also the garden where Jesus is betrayed by his disciple, Judas Iscariot, with a kiss. A kiss shared between two men in a garden is also part of the narrative of Wood’s novel: a kiss that, like the kiss shared between Judas and Jesus, is observed by unnamed others, and which results in both a betrayal and a loss.

Jocelyn, and her garden, are destroyed (though only partly) only to be reborn in a new, perhaps more authentic, form. Before we read about Jocelyn and her garden, however, we read about Martin’s experiences of a metaphoric period of exile – forty years in the desert Jocelyn later transforms into a garden – during which he questions his faith in God, his work as a doctor, and his love for Jocelyn. He questions his love in the same sense that many theologians question their faith in God (ie: apply reason to faith): not because his love falters, but because he struggles to reconcile his real experience of love with love in its Ideal Form.

His work in the vegetable garden at the monastery with James is a source of comfort and self-reconciliation and the site of his eventual reconnection with a sensual and, perhaps, sexual self, and with the possibility of embracing a broader, more nurturing and more practical life, symbolised both in the vegetable garden itself, with its life-sustaining produce, and in the carved stone bearing the word Colo he buries in the earth. Colo is a latin word meaning both ‘to cultivate’ and ‘to worship’, as the novel points out to us. In some sense, the connection between cultivation and worship is the deep spiritual and romantic lesson both Martin and Jocelyn must learn in order to love each other. They must learn to cultivate, or care for, the landscape and for each other: and they must each learn that such a duty of care is also a form of worship, or love.

They must learn the lesson of love attributed to St Augustine by the great internet bubble (though I can’t find it anywhere in his work, and the translation seems remarkably un-Augustinian in tone):

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

There are other possible meanings for the Latin word colo, including the action of casting a fishing net. This imagery, of fishing, and of the water on which the net settles before it sinks, is also part of this beautifully-written novel. A book in which the author manages that magic trick: simple things are allowed their complexity, and complex things rendered simply (without losing any of their complexity).

Water is also a recurring and shifting symbol throughout this novel: as soothing balm, as necessary to cultivation, as cleansing and destructive storm and as baptismal salve. Martin’s first romantic gesture is to bring Jocelyn a fish, which she prepares for them to eat, transferring its sequin-scales to her wrists in the process. Their real romance begins, however, when they move into his house by the sea at Pittwater  He brings her gifts from the sea – fish when he goes out fishing, but also seaweed and shells and stones – while she works on her editing, and reads letters from her sister about the Thames: the river of London washing up against the warmer, wider, wilder lakes of the Pittwater in the reader’s mind, their waters uneasily sifted together.

One night later in their relationship, Martin brings a crab home for dinner: a gift from a patient he has treated, somewhat unsuccessfully, and which he struggles to kill, or to subdue into the pot with ease. When they part, the ferry “moves away over that now uncrossable swathe of water” (48). For Christmas, Jocelyn gives Martin a painting of the Pittwater: a painting he takes with him when they separate, but leaves behind later, when he is forced into yet another leavetaking. Water also has a baptismal or healing function in religious imagery, in particular, which is evoked in this novel. When Martin turns up at the monastery his legs are “moving as though he had been months at sea” and his prayers there are “like swimming in green water”.

The title image of the submerged cathedral refers to the Debussy La Cathedrale Engloutie, and recalls the tales of a drowned city Jocelyn remembers hearing a story about, and which she recalls when she visits a small church in rural France. The Breton legend on which Debussy based his prelude is about the cursed underwater cathedral of Ys. This magical city rises up from the water when it is clear, but even on wintry, windblown days, the sounds of the cathedral can be heard: priests chanting, bells ringing, perhaps the sound of the waves lapping against the stained glass windows of the cathedral. According to the legend, the city of Ys was the most beautiful in the world, but sank when the daughter of the city’s king, Dahut, under the influence of the devil disguised as a knight, stole the keys to the city and left the gates open during a storm. A wave as high as a mountain came through the gates and swamped the city. (Jocelyn and Martin endure a storm during their last night camping out in the desert before the return to her Blue Mountains home and the tragedy that will tear them apart). It is said that when the city of lights – Paris – finally sinks, the city of Ys will rise again.

In the context of this novel – and because I went off on a little St Augustine binge after reading this book – I can’t help thinking of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God), as well: another ideal city from which divine music can sometimes by heard, and which may someday rise (or ‘we’ may rise to it) when the City of Man (the city of lights) has disappeared.

Jocelyn and Martin’s love for each other – that most beautiful of imagined cities – is metaphorically submerged beneath the weight of duty, grief, guilt, blame, doubt and social constrictions. On clear days, they may be able to hear the siren song of their mutual affection wafting up through the crashing of the waves, but for decades the music of their submerged cathedral is drowned out or ignored, or their love is sublimated into other affections and duties: family, work, religious faith, gardening. Nevertheless, their love for each other is a constant source of both comfort and longing. As Martin writes in a letter to Jocelyn, quoting from The Song of Songs, in a passage that becomes a powerful coda to the novel, “Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.”

Perhaps this is made more powerful through a sense of irony, a sense that even though both characters want to believe in such a powerful force of love (have faith), reason – and experience – teach them that death and its attendant griefs and losses, its burden of guilt and regret, will not simply be overcome by love. Rather, perhaps, both love (life, joy) and death (sorrow, loss) must be countenanced and stored alongside each other in the heart: both must be accepted. There is a sense, for me as a reader, that the underlying tragedy of Martin’s quoting this line to Jocelyn is that, for them, death has intervened in their experience of love, has been stronger than love – at least for a time. The seal on their hearts has been as much a seal that closes off love: sealing it away like a buried/submerged treasure, or like a body untimely entombed, as it has been a seal of affirmation.

As the poet e e cummings writes, in a poem that echoes many of the core sentiments of this novel, though perhaps (in the whole poem) in an unbridled reversal Martin and Jocelyn might have done well to discover a little earlier (though then, there would be no story, or at least a very different story, to tell):

…

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

If Borges had had his way – and he generally did – all polysyllables would have been replaced by monosyllables, especially in the third and fourth revisions, to which he often pressed his absent collaborators. People concerned about the legitimacy of the literal might well be scandalized by his mania for dehispanization.

EH: He was using you as writing hands…

BB: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark. My language often embarrasses me. It’s too youthful, too Latinate. I love Anglo-Saxon. I want the wiry, minimal sound. I want the power of Cynewulf, Beowulf, Bede. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny.”

(Ben Belitt in conversation with Edwin Honig. from The Poet’s Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation, edited by Edwin Honig, University of Massachussetts Press, 1985: 62)

She told me, very precisely, and in a way that made me think she had memorised what she would say before I arrived, what she had thought of my latest translation. It took great effort for us both to attend to the particulars. She told me again the story of Flaubert’s 80-year-old niece, Caroline Commanville, quoting the last line of his Herodias to Willa Cather: Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient al-ter-na-tive-ment. She told me to attend to how that final adverb staggers on the tongue, and in the mouth, like the hurried footsteps of John’s disciples bearing away their prophet’s severed head. “Flaubert,” she said, closing her eyes momentarily to encounter and turn back the pain that assailed her, “he understood la mélodie de la phrase. As you, it seems, do not.”