Herta Müller: The Hunger Angel

But there are treasures, Tur Prikulitsch was correct about that. The fact that I came back is a stroke of crippled luck that’s permanently grateful, a survival top that starts spinning at the least damned thing. It has me in its grip just like all my treasures, which I cannot bear but also can’t let go of. I’ve been using them now for over sixty years. They are weak and pushy, intimate and disgusting, forgetful and vindictive, worn out and new. They are Artur Prikulitsch’s dowry and I can’t tell one from the other. When I list them, I start to stumble.

My proud inferiority.

My grumbled fear-wishes.

My reluctant haste, I jump from zero all the way to a hundred.

My defiant compliance, I acknowledge that everyone is right so I can hold it against them.

My fumbled opportunism.

My polite miserliness.

My wearied envy of yearning, of others who know what they want from life. A feeling like stiff wool, cold and frizzy.

My steep-sided hollowness, I’m all spooned out, hard-pressed on the outside and empty on the inside ever since I no longer have to go hungry.

My lateral transparency, that I fall apart by going inward.

My burdened afternoons, time moving with me in between the furniture, slowly and heavily.

My fundamental leaving in a lurch. I need much closeness, but I don’t give up control. I’m a master of the silken smile even as I shrink back. Since the hunger angel, I don’t allow anyone to possess me.

The most burdensome of my treasures is my compulsion to work. It is the reverse of forced labor, an emergency exchange. In me sits the merciful compeller, a relative of the hunger angel. He knows how to keep all my other treasures in line. He climbs into my brain, pushing me into the enchantment of compulsion, because I am afraid of being free.

From my room I can see the clock tower of the Schlossberg here in Graz. At my window is a large drawing table. My latest blueprint is lying on my desk like a faded tablecloth. The paper’s full of dust, like the summer on the streets outside. When I look at it, it doesn’t remember me. Every day since spring a man has been passing in front of my apartment walking a short-haired white dog. He has a black walking stick, extremely thin, with just a slight curve for a handle, like a giant vanilla bean. If I wanted to, I could greet the man and tell him that his dog looks exactly like the white pig that my homesickness used to ride through the sky. The truth is I’d like to have a word with the dog. It would be good if the dog went on a walk by himself for once, or just with the vanilla bean and without the man. Maybe that will happen someday. In any case, I’ll be staying where I am, and the street will stay where it is, and there’s a lot of summer left. I have time, and I wait.

What I like best of all is sitting at my little white formica table, one meter long and one meter wide, a square. When the clock tower strikes half past two, the sun falls into the room. The shadow on the floor from my little table is a gramophone suitcase. It plays the daphne song or the pleated Paloma. I pick up the cushion off the sofa and dance into my awkward afternoon.

There are also other partners.

I’ve danced with the teapot.

With the sugar bowl.

With the biscuit tin.

With the telephone.

With the alarm clock.

With the ashtray.

With the house key.

My smallest partner is a torn-off coat button.

Not true.

Once a dusty raisin was lying underneath the little white formica table. And I danced with the raisin. Then I ate it. And then there was a distance deep within me.

By the summer of 1944 the Red Army had advanced deep inside Romania; the Fascist dictatorship was overthrown, and its leader, Ion Antonescu, was arrested and later executed. Romania surrendered and in a surprise move declared war on its former ally, Nazi Germany. In January 1945 the Soviet general Vinogradov presented a demand in Stalin’s name that all Germans living in Romania be mobilized for “rebuilding” the war-damaged Soviet Union. All men and women between seventeen and forty-five years of age were deported to forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union.

My mother, too, spent five years in a labor camp.

The deportations were a taboo subject because they recalled Romania’s Fascist past. Those who had been in the camp never spoke of their experiences except at home or with close acquaintances who had also been deported, and then only indirectly. My childhood was accompanied by such stealthy conversations; at the time I didn’t understand their content, but I did sense the fear.

In 2001, I began having conversations with former deportees from my village. I knew that the poet Oskar Pastior had been deported, and I told him I wanted to write a book on the subject. He offered to help me with his recollections. We began to meet regularly; he talked, and I wrote down what he said. We soon found ourselves wanting to write the book together.

When Oskar Pastior died so suddenly in 2006, I had four notebooks of handwritten notes, in addition to drafts of several chapters. After his death I felt paralyzed. His close presence in the notes made the loss even greater.

A year passed before I could bring myself to say farewell to the We and write a novel alone. But without Oskar Pastior’s details about everyday life in the camp I could not have done it.

Amid all the upheavals and mass movements of the 1940s, Leo Auberg is doubly displaced—as an ethnic German deported from his home in Romania and as a man with poetic and erotic sensibilities at constant odds with his surroundings. As he says: “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.”

In one novel after the other, it has been Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul among victims of totalitarianism. When the words cannot be found, she invents them. And when words do not suffice, she alloys the text with silence, creating striking prose of great tensile strength.

Translating this prose requires unpacking it in one language and repacking it in another. New coinages such as Nichtrührer or Atemschaukel defy literal rendering: “non-stirrer” and “breath-swing” fail to convey the layers of meaning lurking in these compound words that echo the wordplay in Oskar Pastior’s poetry. Even uninvented words strain against a single definition: Geschirr may be a bowl or a dish or a tin plate or a mess kit or simply a vessel waiting to be filled with something that will determine its meaning, like words themselves, especially in Leo Auberg’s world, where innocent expressions are frequently filled with lethal content. Words, too, can be displaced. My task was to preserve this fundamental displacement without adding undue dislocation.

In matters of style and punctuation I have kept close to the original, where the abandonment of question marks and semicolons reflects the unpunctuated thoughts of the narrator, the simultaneity of insight and experience, the blurring of past and present. Similarly, I have followed the author’s use of small capitals to mark certain words of iconic significance to the narrator.

All of these matters require careful consideration. Fortunately I have not been working alone, and I’m thankful to my family and friends for their kind assistance. Thanks to Herta Müller for indulging my many queries and to the staff at Metropolitan Books for their ongoing support. I am indebted to Ed Cohen for his usual creative scrutiny of the text and to Joana Ocros-Ritter for her invaluable ear in various languages. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Sara Bershtel for her consistently remarkable insights and generous engagement.