Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

That itself was a joke for which the sober Germans of the 1950s had little appreciation. Nevertheless, the German critics had high praise for Rezzori’s novel: in 1959, Der Spiegel ran a portrait of the author on its cover, and the book was awarded the coveted Fontane Prize. Equally important was the subsequent translation into numerous languages, as that ensured that the novel would not be restricted to German readers alone. Because despite his success, in the isolated and often very provincial milieu of the Bundesrepublik , Rezzori always remained a bit foreign, a bit suspect. The German literary establishment, it could be said, had abandoned Rezzori from the start. And that compels a certain respect.

Speaking of Major Tildy, Prefect Tarangolian relates: “He himself supposedly said he knows only two types of response: the witty one and the just one.” The prefect’s clever turn of phrase may also be applied to Rezzori’s writing. He didn’t intend his work to be “just,” in other words clear and well-balanced, with no fluctuation in quality; he wanted his writing to be “witty”—erratic, unpredictable, enjoyable, and shimmering. He wanted to live well and make money, act in films, travel the world, be a friend of the rich and famous and a great writer on top of that. In all of this he succeeded, and because he cared so little for the just response and so much for the witty solution to things, he personified the trickster, the capricious conjurer, able to mix low vernacular and high tone like few others. Like all good novels, An Ermine in Czernopol is also a portrait of its maker: mischievous and fun, wise and unjust, impossible to reduce to a single formula, extraordinarily intelligent, and marked with a humor that reaches deeply into the darkness of things.

— DANIEL KEHLMANN

WITH An Ermine in Czernopol , Gregor von Rezzori conjures a world we cannot inhabit except in fiction. The once-upon-a-time city of Czernowitz becomes the invented city of Czernopol. The voices in the book are real, though the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Nowhere but Czernopol could such a story take place. And no one but Rezzori could call this city to life, with its variety and mix of languages, its range of characters, its register of voices … And he does this with words. Words that tug and stretch at the German language, playfully, mockingly. Words that must find a new home in English.

Nor is that the only challenge facing the translator. Rezzori’s prowess as a raconteur hardly eclipses the depth of his philosophical inquiry or the breadth of his erudition, and the text contains layers of style and levels of thought that go beyond the recounting of personal experience, ranging from journalistic reporting on social movements to Proustian ruminations on memory — all tinged with melancholy — not only for the passing of childhood but for the loss of all that ended with the Second World War.

In the translation I have made certain stylistic choices to help bring readers into the world of the novel without burdening them with too much “foreignness.” Spellings of names and places that were “Germanized” in the original appear here in their proper Romanian (or other) form. Passages cited in another language are translated in the text or, in very few instances, with a footnote.

Many people have helped see this project through. I am particularly grateful to Beatrice Monte della Corte for her generosity at Santa Maddalena, where I had access to the author’s handwritten corrections to the novel (Rezzori frequently edited and emended texts long after their publication). For their careful editing I would like to thank Edward Cohen, Edwin Frank, Sara Kramer, and Helen Graves. Special thanks to Joana Ocros-Ritter for her keen ear and careful reading across so many languages. As always, I am especially grateful to my family for their encouragement and ongoing forbearance. For any and all lapses I can only hope that they, as well as the readers, show the same leniency as the citizens of Czernopol, where “lowliness was never a fault.”

— Philip Boehm

THERE are other realities besides and beyond our own, which is the only one we know, and therefore the only one we think exists.

A man staggers out of the howling recesses of some seedy dive into the uncertain gray of dawn.

His movements reveal the combination of bold daring and practiced confidence that mark a habitual drinker — the deadly serious parody of a clown.

His face is the crater field of some lost satellite.

His senses are seething with impulses: the din of the tavern, philological disputes, pride, humiliation, love, quotations, dirty jokes, hate, loneliness, faith, purity, despair—

He doesn’t know his way home.

So he sleepwalks to the next intersection, where the tram tracks cross the street — two dully glistening snakes.

Keeping his head aloft as though he were blind, he taps and tests the ground with his cane, then he pokes it into one of the rail grooves, and lets himself be led as if tethered to a pole.

The tip of his cane sails through the groove, raising a bow wave of moldy leaves and trash, gravel, dirt and muck; his shoes splash through puddles, wrench his ankle on the uneven cobblestones, trip over track ties, churn through gravel, dig through dust. The fog slaps his face like wet cotton wool. Wind tears at the strands of hair that dangle onto his forehead from below the edge of his hat; dew settles on his lips, giving them a salty taste, and collects in tickling drops inside the two creases on either side of his mouth: his pulpy, oily cheeks do not absorb the moisture. He mumbles to himself, occasionally blurts something out loud, launches into a song, interrupts himself, laughs, goes

silent, resumes his mumbling. His eyes are wide open and fixed unblinkingly ahead, like those of a blind man, like those of the gods.

In this manner he travels from one end of the city to the other.

The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is called Czernopol.

He knows nothing of its reality:

He doesn’t perceive its awakening, doesn’t notice the hanging pearls of the arc lamps, garish against the pallid sky, as they expire with a crackling hiss, or the spaces that come looming up around the buildings on both sides of the street, hoisting the city out of the darkness and into the morning; he doesn’t see the waxy bright rectangles of lighted windows as they emerge randomly amid the interlocking jumble of boxes — one here, one there, one over yonder. He doesn’t see the Jewish bakers rolling their wagons out of the dark side streets, doesn’t smell the heavy, hot aroma of freshly baked bread, doesn’t hear the rattle of the farmers’ carts wending toward the market, one by one, or the clatter of their small, emaciated horses, poked and prodded down the long melancholy roads from the flatland far away. He is as oblivious to the laughter of the passing late-night revelers as he is to the brutish barking of the policeman who fails to recognize him — a new, and obviously uninitiated, recruit. He knows nothing of the shadowy figures breaking out of the black caves of the building entranceways, wandering the streets toward unknown destinations, nothing of the sulfurous sky rising over the treetops in the Volksgarten, like Heaven on the Day of Judgment, and nothing, too, of the discordant screech of the first streetcar as it leaves the loop to join “the line,” and which is heading straight in his direction—