My Life and Thoughts

Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag).  It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.

In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.

A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.)  As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.

In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list.  In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…

…I recently completed an English translation of a text by Konstantin Vagionov for publication in the catalog of the Fifth Berlin Biennale (whose interesting web site features not only a giant floating engraving of a jellyfish, but also contact information for the “Secret Service”).  The text was an excerpt from Vaginov’s Garpagoniana (The Harpagoniad), named after Molière’s miser, Harpagon.

Interestingly, “Harpagon” is also the name of a “Catalogue for Creative Brides,” whose closeout bargain department currently includes such interesting items as “12 Assorted Buckram Hat Frames” ($20):

What a bargain!… 4 variations on the pillbox shape (these could use a little bit of steaming to bring back the shape; that’s totally doable), 3 wreath rings, 3 taller smaller rings, and 2 “skullcaps”…  Not sure how to use them? Consult the easy-to-follow directions in “I Do” Veils—So Can You!

What thrifty and resourceful brides!

Returning to Vaginov: the translation assignment came from my former professor, the film historian Oksana Bulgakowa.  In bygone days, the literary historian Luba Golburt and I once collaborated on a translation of Kazimir Malevich’s essays on film, under Bulgakowa’s aegis. These essays were about things like: how Malevich spits on the altar of the bourgeois representational Easelists. 

Golburt and I were particularly proud of our translation of an invective against reactionary painters who “want to make a roza (rose) from a rozha (mug, snout)”: “to make a primrose from a pig’s nose.”  (Probably, the Harpagon bridal catalogue would have some good ideas for these reactionary painters… make your own bridal primrose from 12 styrofoam pig-noses…)  Nice, eh?  This and other elegant turns of phrase, in The White Rectangle: Writings on Film (Potemkin Press, $25).

I guess with such evidence of my mad translating skillz, plus my lack of full-time employment (one of the things that sets me apart from the literary historian Luba Golburt), I was Bulgakowa’s natural choice; although in fact, at the time I received her kind email, all I could have told you about the identity of Konstantin Vaginov would have been something like: “Wasn’t he some poet from the 1920s?” Well, OK, he was (w00t! I am not as ignorant as I could be!). 

But, as I learned from an interesting article by Colin Fleming, the short-lived and handsome Vaginov (1899–1934) also wrote no fewer than four novels, the last of which, Garpagoniana, “is the closest Russian literature has ever come to Finnegans Wake, only with nothing approaching the respite granted by the river Liffey flowing into the sea”:

This is the novel as a million found texts, a chain letter of narrative addressed to both character and reader—whose fundamental difference, as in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler… is that one happens to be in the book and the other is holding it… One section in particular makes Beckett’s Endgame seem almost like an outtake from a Disney script: An alcoholic goes to a bar. He walks into the lavatory, where a group of friends are sharing anecdotes on drunkenness, each and every one of which is revealed, in full, in the text. At this point, the saga of the alcoholic is dropped entirely from the novel, the poor fellow sentenced for all eternity to a room of filth and human excrement…

Of course, this sounded like just the kind of cheery bagatelle I would love to dash off in one of my free moments. On the other hand, something about Finnegan’s Wake plus Calvino plus Beckett gave me a shadow of hesitation about the language level.  I wrote to Bulgakowa expressing my concerns, to which she replied: ”Vaginov’s text is not difficult,” appending, to these reassuring words, the first page of the novel.

The first page of The Harpagoniad is about a guy sitting in his apartment at night, sorting through his collection of fingernails. (Apparently, the Biennale curators asked Bulgakowa for texts on the theme of “collecting,” and this is what she came up with.) He has a box full of fingernails, each labeled with the name of the donor and the place and date of their collection.  The first nail is labeled: “Samarkand, 1921, Koposhevich.”

Samarkand! This was clearly a sign—because even as we speak I am trying to write a “literary memoir” about my own long-ago experiences as a student in Samarkand.  What did this sign mean?  I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take the job. 

* * *Dear readers!  Having spent the entire morning blogging (see my dissertation for a literary-theoretical approach to the “problem of the time of writing”), I am becoming increasingly aware that the abovementioned literary memoir about Samarkand isn’t going write itself any time soon… so, I leave you here for the time being. What did the remainder of the Harpagoniad hold in store? What action have I personally taken to reciprocate to German literary culture, for their interest in my work?  This and more, in the next installment of My Life and Thoughts. The Registan, Samarkand

Tags: academic life, comparative literature, d-list, Germany, graphomania, Luba Golburt, Malevich, n+1, publications, Russian literature, Uzbekistan, w00t!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.