Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

In any case, I was making no headway with the bookstore clerk. But fortunately, at this moment a gentleman entered the store from a back room, and I immediately turned to him, suspecting that he was the bookseller himself, which he was. “How much?” I showed him the book, a gesture that caused the man to go into a mild fit. Speaking Mallorquin, a dialect I had little comprehension of, he hissed at his wife and then, politely switching to Castilian, he explained that this spouse of his was constantly committing stupidities such as, for example, thinking that a bookstore was like a bakery, where you kept giving away the merchandise until nothing was left on the shelves. So it was hardly to be expected that the poor woman knew anything at all about literature. Was it my wish to abscond with San Pablo ? He was glad to have arrived on the scene when he did, for otherwise this copy of the book would also have disappeared, never to be seen again! Such things just didn’t happen in his store. He urged me to consider that there were only three copies left — three! A week ago there had been two dozen, and before that about fifty. The book was selling like hotcakes, and it was Miguel’s fault. Although I appeared to be a foreigner, surely I was aware that the man he meant was Unamuno. “So please, Sir, hand me the book. It belongs up there on the shelf. This is a bookstore, not a bakery.”

The bookseller replaced my copy next to the other dead stock on the shelf. Stunned, I remained silent. Don Joaquín Verdaguer had once recounted for me a similar story, and I thought it was just an example of his clever broma , one of his Lichtenbergian vignettes.

“How much does a book like that cost,” I finally dared to inquire. “Maybe I can’t even afford it.”

“Perhaps. It’s difficult to judge the purchasing power of book buyers. But a book from Editorial Apolo—8 pesetas.”

“I’m happy to hear that. All I have is one duro.”

“Fine. You’re a customer after my own heart. You keep your duro, and I’ll keep my book.”

“Could I just write down the author’s name?”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll give you the publisher’s brochure, and you can try at the new store on San Miguel, just opened up. New-fangled place, you know. They’ll sell anything — anything, I tell you.” As I left his establishment he shouted after me that nowadays literature was going to the dogs — illiterates were buying up every last thing. Did he mean me, or his wife? Probably both of us.

Mulet didn’t have the book, but he knew of this Portuguese writer, and offered to have a copy of San Pablo sent over from Barcelona. It would be there in a few days, maybe the day after tomorrow — no, not “maybe” but definitely. This meant that I had a few weeks time, and that I would have to do some fancy work with the duro we obtained through our friendship with the Mengelbergs. I was obliged to enter into negotiations with the beggar on the cathedral steps. After submitting to his usual reprimands, I pretended that I was simply a passer-by who would gladly give him something, but that I had just discovered that my last duro was a genuine sevillano , and thus I would have to walk all the way home to Génova. The beggar suggested fifty-fifty. I gave him the 5 pesetas, and in return I received 2.50 and blessings from all the saints, plus 100 days indulgence. I was still lacking two reales, but surely Mulet would offer me that much credit. After all, I wasn’t his only intelectual con su carcoma , to quote the title of a novel by Mario Verdaguer.

São Paulo by Teixeira de Pascoaes turned out to be the great adventure of my life. Don Juan Sureda Bimet: your Catholic German thanks you and your golden veins, along with Pascoaes and his Iberian St. Paul, for having transported him to the Heaven of the godless.

I had come upon a religious genius.

Almost twenty years have passed since I first read a line of Pascoaes. From the first page onward I knew that I was being touched by a genius who would command my total loyalty. On the final pages I pondered with the Lusitanian seer where on this earth the apostle’s poor, emaciated body might have been returned to the soil, this body so worn down by inexpressible anguish. “Was it in Spain? In Rome? In Asia? In Macedonia? Did Lydia and Timothy close his eyelids and bury him amid showers of tears?” At that time, archeological excavations in Catalonia made it seem certain that the apostle had indeed made his questionable Iberian journey. In Unamuno’s eyes, this caused the Pascoalinian St. Paul to become doubly Iberian. Upon reading Pascoaes’ book Unamuno issued the summons, “ San Pablo , open up Spain!” I knew right away that I would be this writer’s translator. And that is just what I am. But what is more, I became his private humanist, as Menno ter Braak has called me. God willing — that is, the “godless God” of Pascoaes — I will also be his biographer.

I read the work in a single sitting, a feat that I rarely accomplish with a book, especially when the topic is religion. It discussed problems that had plagued me for years. The author dealt with questions that lay beyond the ultimate questions in a fascinating, often obscure, often spare style of writing: the sins of God, the restoration of the world, the unity of crime and redemption, mankind not as sinner but as sin itself and, as a logical extension of this idea that was so familiar to me, theologians as God’s gravediggers, reality as the forecourt of the magical temple of illusion, and the mysterium tremendum in the company of the tremenda … Dear reader, do go out and purchase and read St. Paul for yourself and you will learn all that I owed to Don Juan’s golden veins, and just what a treasure I had obtained for one genuine duro, a second phony one, and a little bit of credit from my friend Mulet. Take this book and read, at the risk of seeing your own personal Pixedes head for the hills. It is your problem whether you have to pay for the volume with your last penny. Your bookseller will at all events greet you with open arms, for in the meantime Pascoaes has become a writer for the “happy few”—which is to say, he is now a white elephant.

As I read on, I caught myself mentally translating whole passages, assuring myself that I was going to transfer São Paolo into my own language. It occurred to me that the Spanish version could not be “correct” in all respects, that the translator hadn’t achieved his aims, unless my own premonitions about the work were themselves incorrect or overshot the mark. Later, when I compared the Spanish with the original, I found that I had been right all along. My instincts had not atrophied, Spain had not yet worn me down to the point where I would put off until tomorrow what I ought to start doing today: learn Portuguese in order to comprehend more of this extraordinary writer. Portuguese had the reputation of being a more difficult language than Spanish. To be equal to the task I would have to feed my brain with more phosphorus. I wrote to the author and asked him for the rights to a German edition of his São Paulo . Pascoaes, the Squire of Pascoaes, replied by return mail — a gesture of special distinction, as I later learned. It meant a great deal to him to be translated into German, a language with which he was not familiar. Germany was for him more the land of the nebulous philosopher of Königsberg than that of the Olympian Poet of Weimar. We began a correspondence that, with the exception of the seven years when we lived at his estate Pascoaes, lasted until just a few weeks before his death.

My Hunnish graves, my consultancy in legal and sexual affairs, Count Kessler, Leopold Fabrizius — all of these things now took a back seat to my departure into the realm of saudade . The worst to suffer was our cache of savings for postage, for precisely 37 publishers rejected my Pascoaes manuscript until Rascher in Zurich finally dared to undertake this adventure of the spirit. This meant that I had broken the boomerang record for literature, which up to that time was held by Remarque with 33 rejections of his All Quiet on the Western Front . I wrote Pascoaes about this. He replied, saying that in an epoch when for every thousand persons who could write a book there might be a single one who could read one, it was indeed a triumphant accomplishment to have located 37 German readers for his book.