Danilo Kiš - The Lute and the Scars

With the help of a poet he discovered at an early age the mysterious, encrypted language of love. As an eighteen-year-old, in love with a fellow student, a German girl, he discovered that in this poet’s works there was one poem for every phase of amour (for raptures, disappointment, dread, regret); and he commenced translating. And so he translated—“completely à propos ”—fifty of the poems, and at the point when the love-cycle had quickened in the German language and was already in the printer’s hands, love evolved for him, via the process of crystallization (to put it in Stendhal-ese), to that point at which passion begins to smolder and go out. All that remained of the whole youthful adventure and amorous delirium was this anthology of translated poems, like some dog-eared photo album. And that purplish echo around the issue of love in his novels, and that lyric tension in his sentences that was to be noted by critics, and not without a certain perplexity.

Every sensitive young nature, above all when it is flooded by education and music as in his case, tends to regard the powerful, turbulent fascinations of body and soul, that lyrical magma of youth, as precocious signs of talent. These natures are inclined to think that the issue is more often than not simply one of the secret quiverings of their susceptibilities, the imprecise teaming up of glandular secretions and sympathetic spasms, a symbiosis of their organism’s tectonics and the music of the soul — those things that are the gift of youthfulness and intellectual precociousness and, similar to poetry in their tremblings, are easily mistaken for it. And once under the power of this magic — which grows over the years to be a dangerous habit, like tobacco and alcohol — a person will continue writing, with the skilled hand of a hack, writing sonnets and elegies, patriotic verse and occasional pieces; and it is now obviously just a matter of being a wound-up mechanism that lurched into motion in one’s youth and now continues to turn, by the force of habit or inertia, at each and every brush of the breeze, like an empty windmill.

In that epoch, when the Bildungsroman was in full flower in European literature and writers were basing their work on the social origins of the protagonist (the “narrator,” behind whom was concealed a slightly altered autobiography), in a kind of perpetual self-recrimination and escape from their own environment and in a belabored emphasis on their disloyalty, or, on the contrary, in that other version of vanitas that underscores the writer’s ordinary origins, emancipating him from inherited sin and any fatalistic responsibility for the evils of this world, and vouchsafing him the divine right to label things evil with no contrition — it was in that period, then, that Egon von Németh consciously did away with the autobiographical elements in his work. He considered the question of his parents and origins to be a triviality and an accident of fate, even while intuiting with great foresight that in the theory of social origins there were signs of a new and dangerous theology of original sin, in the face of which the individual was helpless, marked for all time, with the stamp of sin on his brow as if put there by a red-hot brand.

“I am a typical mixture from the Habsburg Empire of blessed memory: simultaneously Hungarian, Croat, Slovak, German, Czech, and if I were to nose around in my genealogy and have my blood analyzed — which these days is a very popular kind of science in the world of nationalities — then I would find there, as in a stream-bed, traces of Tsintsar, Armenian, and, yes, maybe even Roma and Jewish blood. But this science of the spectral analysis of blood is one that I do not recognize. It is a science by the way of very dubious value; it’s dangerous and inhumane, especially nowadays and in our region where this menacing theory of Blut und Boden engenders nothing but mistrust and hatred, and where this ‘spectral analysis of blood and origins’ is typically carried out in a sensationalistic and primitive manner — with a knife and revolver. I’ve been bilingual since birth, and I wrote in Hungarian and German until I was eighteen; that was when I translated that collection by the Hungarian poet and opted for the German language, because it’s the nearest to my heart. I am, good sirs, a German writer; the world is my homeland.”

(On the basis of this text, which forms part of an interview from 1934, one gets the feeling that “the late Feldner” in that family photo album might have had one of those dangerous “blood types” that the nationalists considered inheritable, like syphilis.)

First and foremost, this stand of his was the product of his organic resistance to banality. For the theory of origins, of racial ones on the one hand and social ones on the other, had taken on monstrous proportions in those years and become a commonplace amid all the misunderstandings and rapprochements: the great idea of community descended upon the salons and in the marketplaces. It gathered under its banner people wise and stupid, noble spirits and the dregs of society — people, therefore, who were linked neither by any personal affinity nor by any intellectual kinship but solely by this banal, hackneyed, and dangerous theory of race and social origins. That is why in the works of Egon von Németh, works that otherwise teem with representatives of all the social strata of Europe of that day — the nobility, the upper bourgeoisie, the middle class, intellectuals from every possible background, merchants and craftsmen, officials and functionaries, parasites and the Lumpenproletariat , workers, peasants, nationalists, soldiers, traditionalists, social democrats, revolutionaries — in these works the autobiographical elements are absent. The witness must be impartial; the grief and repentance of the one party must be as alien to him as the prejudiced thinking of the other.

The man without a country, the stateless one, the cosmopolitan — as he was labeled by the newspapers in his home country — traveled to Amsterdam in the middle of April, after making a long arc through Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. Along the way he wanted to visit his old, infirm father in Pest and absorb the European climate so that he would have some fresh and reliable material for his new novel Farewell to Europe . From Pest, where he took leave of his father in the awareness that he would probably never see him again, he traveled on in this way to Amsterdam, where he negotiated with his publisher, a certain van der Lange, the same man who had published his first novel a year ago, in German.

Mr. van der Lange was one of those young publishers who — because of some sudden resolution — reorient their love of literature, and perhaps their talents as well, from the goal of uncertain literary fame to the much more secure business of publishing the types of books, and even the very books themselves, that they would have wanted to write (and could have written?). After inheriting his father’s lending-library business, which was in addition part bookstore and part stationery store, Mr. van der Lange decided one day to print the books of his friends, having burned his own poems first, with a touch of regret. He was a lover of German literature; Heine was the first writer to poison him with poetic reveries and teach him the difference between the lyrical and the ironic, as well as the fragile relationship between them — a knack that is as hard to find among poets as it is among readers. In the 1930s, as German writers were becoming less and less able to find publishers in their fatherland, having been adjudged insufficiently transported by the national spirit or poisoned by the inheritance of their blood, Mr. van der Lange started publishing the books of German refugees, without being at all unfaithful to his preferences. The writers found in him not just a publisher of their works but also someone who gave them a friendly word and some encouragement. He was, in other words, one of those publishers whom success, money, and fame hadn’t made arrogant and inaccessible, or who just went through the motions, seeing their writers as frauds and malingerers who, instead of doing real work, spent their time in pursuit of something entirely vague and pointless.