An experimental novel that pushes the constraints of language to bear witness to the history of both Germany and the individual.
Jürgen Becker’s The Sea in the Radio is a collection of “journal sentences” divided into three sections called notebooks. In this great concert of a novel, language has been pared down to a minimum: fragments, phrases, and short sentences combine and make up a life both banal and profound. It is a life in which many of the details remain unstated or, as in miniatures, float just beyond the edges of the frame. Though at first the narrative may seem to move in a relatively harmless manner, soon enough we begin to realize that the story to be told may indeed be more unsettling than we had suspected.
The Sea in the Radio is a novel that bears witness not only to one’s final years but also to one’s place within history in general and Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth-century past in particular.
"Gutsy, innovative, and experimental novel." – Christoph Janacs
Whenever a story began, he never quite understood where it was supposed to go.
After my father died I found, in his office, a journal he kept for the last full year of his life. He recorded each day’s trips, chores and purchases with occasional comments about my mother’s health, the quality of a restaurant meal, or some other personal detail like a book he was reading. He also tracked the weather and key stock market statistics. It demonstrates just how unwilling he was to let a day pass without a set of accomplishments, but captures none of his opinions, worries or hopes. However, it is one of my most precious possessions, a diary I read as a man in his eighty-eighth year trying to hold on to the passage of time.
There is an element of this kind of reporting the mundane ordinariness of the everyday in Jürgen Becker’s The Sea in the Radio: Journal Sentences, a fragmentary novel stripped to its most essential elements. Within the series of isolated sentences, phrases and brief passages that comprise this work, a regular report of the day to day flow of weeks, seasonal tasks, and observations of nature not only contribute to an atmosphere of place but speak to the desire to believe that some things stay the same, hoping that as long as this flow continues, the story will not end and one can defy death a little longer. But this novel does not recreate a diary as such, rather it constructs a picture of a village or community, past and present, as its residents age and face the end of life, as memories and images surface from a dark history that has left its mark on a generation that spent their childhood and youth during the war.
A train station appears in the course of everyone’s life.
Poet, writer and radio dramatist, Becker was born in Cologne but spent the war years in Thuringia. He was a participant in Gruppe 47, a collection of important German writers, from 1960 until their dissolution in 1967 and has long been involved with PEN Centre Germany and the German Academy for Language and Poetry. He is known for an open form of experimental literature set in opposition to narrative conventions. The Sea in the Radio (2009), perhaps the first of his prose works to be translated into English, reflects the importance of landscape seen in his later works as well as the tendency to cast side-long glances at the experience of growing up during the Second World War that drives so much of his prolific literary output.
This spare, evocative novel speaks, without a direct narrative voice, from the shadows and the corners of a world drawn with sharp, poetic precision. Unnamed characters, recurring motifs and locations and wisdoms build a tale that captures the ordinary business of every day against the long shadows history casts. It begins with bucolic imagery—snow in the winter woods, owls that call at night, the glow of the light—but an ominous tone appears early: the trains off behind the woods that one never saw, the off-road vehicle that is always moving from place to place, photographs showing people or houses that are gone, allusions to secrets lurking. Grammatical tense can be misleading. Is this a statement about the present or the past? Outside the odd quoted statement there is no “I,”, the closest one gets is with the indefinite, gender neutral pronoun “one,” otherwise we move between second, third, and first-person plural perspectives. Wordplay and aphoristic observations also appear, contributing to the overall poetic feel of the text. As we move through the three parts—three orchestral movements that each end with the acknowledgement of the relevant conductor—the story that emerges is dramatic and vivid, despite the fact that so much of it lurks in the silences and spaces between the sentences.
Fine, if you know everything already.
When it is hot and dry, you don’t see any snails in the garden.
What should one do? One does what one can. One does what one can’t.
Motorcycles whining through the village. It’s Sunday.
Watching TV for hours. And then what?
After the storm the sun, immediately humid again, the next storm.
A hissing. Gravel sliding of the loading bed.
He says, Night’s shorter when you can sleep.
The pace is not slow, but charged with a kind of quiet restlessness. This is a novel that invites you to listen closely. An acute awareness of the passage of time and circumstances permeates the work, seeding it not with nostalgia but melancholy. Motifs recur and sentences play off one another, often contradicting what has recently been said, small themes build across a page or two then fade into the background, and there is a knowing humour to some of the observations: “In the waiting room there are magazines that one would never read otherwise.” There is, decades after the years that haunt the aging children that people this landscape, no closure, only increasing decline, illness and loss. And a little wisdom.
When you are old yourself, you treat the old people who are already dead in a friendlier fashion.
Translated by Alexander Booth with an ear to maintaining the rhythm and flow of this fragmentary work, The Sea in the Radio is presented with a design of subtle beauty that features detail from Hokusai’s iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and a pattern simulating water that runs across the lower edge of every page.
Excerpt:
People sitting together. One of them gets up and goes outside. He’s got a job to do and doesn’t come back.
If everyone conforms to all the signals and rules, nothing can go wrong.
They are the smallest birds, the ones in the thorn bushes. Let her go.
Ever more people stream into the hall. It’s not quite full when the roof collapses.
At the kiosk a light still burns.
Another funeral. You see one another every few months, split back up then say, See you next time.
Someone says, for ten years now I’ve begun each day as if it were the last.
At the kiosk a light is always burning, even when it’s closed.
What does voluntarily mean when they say that the apartments have voluntarily been cleared?
Two fatalities, two survivors. The survivors have to figure out what kind of relationship there was between the deceased.
Neighbours standing together and discussing neighbours.
Someone told the truth and since then they have only known aggravation.
One game after another lost, in the end the trainer said he wanted to teach his players the meaning of politeness, tolerance, brotherly love.
The newspaper’s incessant sneer.
Now it’s dark enough. Straining our ears to hear what is outside.
The music doesn’t stop, and the passages are endless, as they’ve been made to be circular.
The stairs lead up to a ramp, but after the ramp there’s nothing.
He’s scribbling away. Everything crooked and canted.
Glass is democratic, the architect says, stone fascistic. Sea mail. The symbol for sea mail is yellow, like land mail. Airmail’s is blue. Blue like the airmail.
If you’re looking for the off-road vehicle, it’s in front of a stream now.
A moment’s wavering...but not so that later they’ll say one wavered too long.
"Jürgen Becker was born in 1932. His childhood, therefore, was the Second World War—a disease from which he has been recovering ever since the fighting stopped. His poems do not presume to address the horrors directly, but with great courage he casts sidelong glances at things he remembers or the things that prompt such memories. These are important poems, not just about the war but about any unbearable catastrophe the scars of which last forever. Okla Elliott's scrupulous translations are faithful to the poems' nervous hurt: their appearance in English is a major event."—David R. Slavitt
Oderbruch
and there are crows bigger than crows
usually are, scattering smoothly over there across the fields.
Nothing over there. Twilight. Gold gray twilight
spreads out. A tree in Poland
is over there the lost barren tree.
Lighted and empty, the bus drives over the levee.
On the riverbank, two men with their backs
to the dam, which neither begins nor ends.
You don’t hear anything. You hear the slippage
of the floe, the circling floe. You hear
for a long time yet, later, in the dark, the drifting ice.
The camera’s broken, else why are the pictures
blurry now? Two men stood on the riverbank.
They came back. They could tell the story.
The myth of the Tower of Babel describes a humanity that has united in the years after the Great Flood. Joined by language and purpose, humans decide to build a city and a tower whose peak reaches the heavens as a testament to the conviction that people would never again be divided along sectarian lines. Of course, the god of the Old Testament didn’t like this idea. He cast groups of people across the globe and gave each a different language. The writers of the King James Version make the interesting choice of using the word “confound” to describe what the god of the Old Testament did to “the language.” How appropriate that the word can mean “to defeat utterly…bring to ruin,” “to overthrow,” or “to destroy the purity, beauty or usefulness of” depending on one’s perspective.
All literature is an act of translation on some level; what are words but representations of things and concepts that are inherently subjective to every reader? Can it be said that any writer’s work is a perfect representation of their thoughts? And how would we even know for sure? Okla Elliott begins Blackbirds in September: Selected Shorter Poems of Jürgen Becker by evoking Umberto Eco’s statement that translation is the “art of failure,” as it is impossible to take a carefully cast sentence, melt it in a crucible and to pour it into the mold of another tongue with perfect fidelity. Does a translator “ruin,” “overthrow” or “destroy the purity” of the original work? Of course not. In his introductory note, Mr. Elliott acknowledges the impossibility of his task while simultaneously proclaiming the beauty and necessity of translated work. Translating is “the best way to read a writer’s work,” makes a writer accessible to those who do not have the original language under their belts, and opens a poet such as Mr. Becker to analysis by scholars in other fields.
Jürgen Becker’s formative years coincided with the highs and lows experienced by Germany before and after World War II. Mr. Becker’s work is imbued with an appropriate weariness and a confirmation of the glory of nature that is sometimes corrupted (or confounded) by war and the people who wage it. The poet uses weather and the flora and fauna affected by it to draw metaphors, to reflect upon humanity and sometimes just to have fun. The tone of the original German lines and their translations is primarily one of knowing calm; Mr. Becker is not an angry firebrand, the kind of thinker who burns him or herself out in a few years of shouting truth to the world. No, the author offers us a slow burn that lends itself to deeper and longer moments of reflection and that result in eventual and powerful change.
True to his word, Mr. Elliott takes very great care to translate the poems without rewriting them. A particular example represents quite nicely the limitations and benefits of this approach to translation. Compare Mr. Becker’s “Vier Zielen” to its English counterpart, “Four Lines:”
.
Vier Zeilen
Unter Pappeln sitzend, und wieder die Stimme
im Selbstgespräch, das nicht aufhört, bis
alles zermübt ist, der Wind erleichtert nichts,
der einfach durch die Blätter geht.
Four Lines
Sitting under the poplars, and once again the voice—
talking to itself—it won’t stop, until everything
is worn away; the wind doesn’t make things easier;
it just blows through the leaves.
Recite Mr. Becker’s lines aloud, even if you don’t have full command of German. Sounding out the words reveals some graceful alliteration. Those “s” sounds followed by those voiceless palatal fricatives of the “ch” phonemes replicate the sound of the wind through the leaves on an autumn day, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the English language simply does not allow Mr. Elliott to recreate this effect with phonemes, so he must go in another direction. You’ll notice that the translator has employed em dashes and semicolons in place of some of the commas in the original, the effect of which matches the legato and adagio music made by waving tree branches.
Mr. Becker’s poetry is inextricably linked with the feeling of place. How appropriate then, that Mr. Elliott discovered his work while studying abroad in Germany. Blackbirds in September is a kind of travelogue; the poet titles his work after cities, municipalities, significant buildings and areas within cities. “Ostende” seems like a harsh and beautiful place that I would very much like to visit…with half my money hidden in my shoe. The staff of the “Hotel Belgica” likely doesn’t put chocolate on your pillows, but you probably bring home some great stories after you check out.
Mr. Elliott’s translations are conservative and respectful. The only notable diversions from the original poems occur when Mr. Elliott experiments with lineation. Taken as a whole, these infrequent experiments are profitable ones, preserving reasonable interpretations of Mr. Becker’s intent. Blackbirds in September does a great service, allowing English speakers to enjoy the work of the winner of the Georg Büchner Prize, one of the most prestigious in German letters. While it is tempting to classify Mr. Becker’s work according to its position in history, the poems also stand as intimate slices of one man’s life that allow us to meditate on our own. Humans remain separated by geography and language, a condition that has persisted since prehistory, no matter your beliefs. Mr. Becker’s poetry and Mr. Elliott’s representation of the verses remind us that we are nonetheless united by our place in nature and the indifference with which Mother Nature sees us. ~ Kenneth Nichols.
http://lifeandlegends.com/review-blackbirds-september/
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