but she knew it wouldn’t be a sentence

On page fourteen of the Northwestern University Press edition of Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s La Femme de Gilles, 1937, tr. Faith Evans, the femme Elisa has taken money out of her handbag when she realises that something is occurring; she doesn’t quite know what but her attention is heightened, she feels vague unease turn to anguish, “behind her back there was another world” and now she is going to approach that other world by saying “an essential sentence.”

She knew she was going to speak. She didn’t know what she would say, but she knew it wouldn’t be a sentence that dropped carelessly from her lips, but rather an essential sentence, a sentence of which she would be the perfect mistress.

When the author writes the sentence on the next page you see that Elisa is not in command of her expressiveness. She seems to be figuring out how her meaning should appear. The pressure between the importance of her words and the casualness she is working to impose on them comes out in the punctuation. Instead of announcing her new decision like a “perfect mistress” she hedges with, “I’ve been thinking … I think I’ll …”

“I’ve been thinking – it’s not tiring, going to the cinema … I think I’ll come with you after all, I’ll ask Marthe to look after the children.”

We’ve seen that the “thinking” she refers to was a sensuous surrender to felt knowledge (“She felt it to be so [...] this mysterious insight which seemed suddenly to have seized her by the throat”), rather than the modest intellectual casualness the spoken sentence suggests; see, she is evading the power of her listeners, her husband and her sister, she is struggling to keep the revelation of her perfect mistresshood from them, she falsely stresses her exhaustion (“it’s not tiring”) and her dependence (“I’ll ask Marthe”), in other words her servitude to physicality, at the same time that an instinct, invisible to them, has made her alone and strong in a middle-world, a not-there-yet, as she begins to approach them mentally in her concealment.

at this point where we pause

Coming off Jean-Paul Richter last year into Heimito von Doderer’s The Merowingians, or, the Total Family, 1962, tr. Vinal Overing Binner, I thought at first that the book’s digressions were Richterian (spontaneous-seeming romanticisms) but as I went on I disagreed with myself. This was a machine, a machine-book, making itself through machine-understanding, by comprehending narrative as a machine that depended on the invention of a vital component to generate form. Once it had invented that component, whatever it was (Dr. Horn’s method of diagnosed repressed anger in his patients by observing the width of the angle between their feet), it allowed itself to create digressions around it (expanding a comment about “the reader’s fury” on page 347 by adding “whose foot angle, at this point where we pause in our questionable reporting, must have already reached an impressive degree”). So it fed like an animal on this machinery, and grew to whatever shape it needed to be to accommodate that digression: chapters odd lengths toward the end, etc, all justified by the machine (first half of the twentieth century he had lived through, Doderer, the age of Buster Keaton and Duchamp’s Large Glass, the machines).

The flesh of the characters becomes mechanical (representing its feelings not through ineffable Richter sighing but via reliable foot-angles) and anger can be switched off (when Dr. Horn leads the sufferers through a scientifically calibrated process that introduces them first to stamping music and then to a room filled with smashable ceramic statuettes). To turn the anger back on again (why? Because a completely cured citizenry would put the Dr Horns of the world out of business) you introduce simple irritations, such as artificial grit in the pockets or a bad manufactured smell. A quote from Doderer’s diary in Jorg Kreienbrock’s Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature, 2012, is helpful: “Anger caused by a small trifle (which objectively would not be more than a trigger, in French a déclic), like a breakfast ruined by an indolent waitress or other caricatures of domestic misfortune, functions as the inserted sparkplug for everything we have on our mind.” So there is something “on our mind,” in the author’s opinion, something that exists before the sparkplug. The flesh clicks on and off like a machine but it is not empty.

Why does he insist on anger? Why is that the form of expression he chooses for the otherwise unexpressed feelings? Thinking back on The Merowingians in the light of that quote you remember the constant slappings, the punches, the beatings, the incidental details like Richenza manifesting her reaction to the Count by kicking him through a door and “[giving] him such a working over that his gaunt face swelled like a pumpkin”; the number of characters who are dominated by rage, revenge, or violence (Childerich III, Schnippedilderich, Pippin, Horn's clients, the sisters Karla and Sonka who “exhibited a repellent and truly detestable savagery”, etc); the war at the end, the general resort to brutality. The perpetual selection of anger is the unsaid thing in the book. The déclic for the selection is writing. Before that there is a why with no answer. (Is the book is ever aware there is a why?)

their yearnings unsung

Playing his piano, Norwid’s Chopin manifests the perfection that Poland is unable to realise; the completeness of Pericles, or of Orpheus on his lyre, a perfection that comes into the world through a physical effort that is superhuman but also tempered, attentive, “softly”:

… like when boys battle boys –
– The keys still resisting
The source of their yearnings unsung
They softly push back on their own.*

When he separates “one moment” from “one moment,” with his comma, Norwid gives the poem something that it doesn’t have anywhere else, an indissoluble capsule of time where one of the actions he imagines (the otherworldly spirit of perfection perpetually existing) can really belong. If “one moment” can live on its own then it has Pericles inside it. I am only writing this because the missing comma in that one translation still bothers me more than other one-word or one-punctuation mark things that have stopped me recently, like “nozzle” for a goat’s nose in William Carlos Williams’ The Desolate Field or the impression I had during page thirty-one of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, that the translators must have been happy when they found the right words for a cute and boring line Kafka copied from the Jewish monthly Der Jude on December 11th, 1917: “The Bible is a sanctum, the world, sputum.” Kafka, on his own, doesn’t write this sort of banality-cloaker. When he plays with repetition he does it to create a paradox by putting two or more things in tension. “We hold the world fast and complain that it is holding us.” But the partnership of “hold” and “holding” looks straightforward for the translators compared with sputum and sanctum, and my thoughts about the heroism on page thirty-one had nothing to do with what the line meant.


*tr. Jerome Rothenberg and Airie Galles

a great brooding-oven

Each century provides us with new things to conceal,
A territory that offers no purchase to the curious eye of affection,
Overgrown with loneliness, its ever denser leaves.

Günter Eich, Dreams, from Angina Days: Selected Poems, 2010, tr. Michael Hofmann



Now-a-days, when forests are burned to charcoal faster than they grow again, the only thing to be done is to warm the climate a good deal, and turn it into a great brooding-oven, kiln, and field-oven, so as to save the trouble, and obviate the necessity, of having stoves in the houses. And this has been in some measure attended to by careful Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who have cleared away the forests as much as they could, they being full of late winter. When one thinks how very beautifully modern Germany contrasts with that which Tacitus mapped, warmed as it is by the mere cutting down of the forests, we have little difficulty in feeling convinced that a time will come when, there being no more timber at all, we shall arrive at such a temperature that the atmosphere itself shall be our fur pelisse.

Jean-Paul Richter, Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel (a Genuine Thorn Piece), 1877, tr. Alexander Ewing

The last one for this year. Sorry, René Char. Sorry Déwé Gorodé.

they seem monotonous

Only the men remaining, able to breathe in peace, each on his own centre in integrated morning mood, the party held together by the ceremonial furnishings of the table and securely apart by the impermanent nature of the gathering.

Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill, 1938



Design (perhaps by definition) seems to guarantee outcome
Better yet
Each outcome is intermediary – the very purpose of pattern is to be reassuring
And yet, since they are saturated with psychial ‘pastness’
Patterns cannot claim limitless purity
Patterns amplify reality because they both modulate and prophesy our perception of them
Where at first they seem monotonous they soon become monstrous
Then is all organization portenteous and narrative


Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy, 1997

jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants

For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Weisenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the wind blows I am in love with nothing else.

The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, vol. 6, 1850, tr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos



This lake, even a mustard seed’s too large to sink in it,
But everyone comes to drink its water.
Deer, jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants are born,
And, barely born, fall back into the lake.

Poem #130, from I, Lalla, the Poems of Lal Ded, 2011, tr. Ranjit Hoskote

[before our own comprehension] (preliminary

Death being the first form of Life which we have had the power to Contemplate, our entrance here being [before our own comprehension] (preliminary to our own) an Exclusion from comprehension, it is [strange] amazing that the fascination of our own predicament does not entice us more. With such sentences as these directly over our Heads we are as exempt from Exultation as the Stones –

Emily Dickinson, worksheet jotting, published in The New England Quarterly, 1955



Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
Which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
Of fear to the horizon

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from the title poem in The Heat Bird, 1983