Ingo Schulze - New Lives

The speech ended with laughter, because when they reached for their glasses for the toast Rudolf Böhme proposed, they found them empty, and Rudolf Böhme interrupted himself by declaring he knew something was missing.

No sooner had they begun to eat than the ketchup bottle was empty, but for some reason it kept moving around the table, a bit of utter foolishness that reached its high point when finally Rudolf Böhme looked up and innocently asked for the ketchup — and after several futile attempts remarked that evidently they were out of ketchup.

Bernadette sat leaning back in her chair, staring at the rest of her toast. She hadn’t joined in the ketchup prank, which was why Titus tried not to laugh too hard.

Martin and Joachim kept on joking around with each other, bringing the rest of the table to silence. As he searched for a question he could pose to Rudolf Böhme, Titus made every effort to put down his knife and fork with as little clatter as possible. He watched Rudolf Böhme bend deep over his plate each time he removed a bite from his fork. The motions of his lips and tongue, as well as the way he gave each mouthful a long, thorough chew, suggested to Titus a kind of reverse speech, as if Rudolf Böhme were now incorporating into his body the words, sentences, and thoughts he would later write or speak.

“What are you working on at the moment, if I may inquire?” Joachim asked.

“He means you, Papa,” Bernadette remarked.

“Or would you prefer not to talk about it?”

Titus used the pause to take a deep breath, in and out.

“I’m translating,” Rudolf Böhme said as he continued to chew. “I’m pretending I know how. I’m working on it with your Brockmann, Boris Brockmann. He’s tremendous, really tremendous, a real translator in fact. I just add the poetical touch afterward.”

With the help of some melted cheese, Rudolf Böhme dabbed up the last toast crumbs.

Boris Brockmann, who would be their Latin and Greek teacher from the tenth grade on, looked like Bertolt Brecht and dressed like him too. Titus never ran into him except if he used the corridor on the top floor of the main building. Seated half on the radiator and half on the windowsill, Brockmann always seemed to be waiting for someone to greet him so he could say his own “Good morning!” with such earnestness and precise articulation that Titus actually heard the original good wish contained in the stock phrase.

“Someone should write a big book about translation,” Rudolf Böhme said, “from Humboldt to today. If you take a closer look, you soon realize that ultimately translation doesn’t exist. And suddenly you’re caught in a trap.” He meticulously wiped his lips.

“Which is why it always sounds so funny, and quite rightly so, when you ask, ‘So what’s the author trying to tell us?’” Rudolf Böhme laughed softly to himself, while his tongue brushed across his teeth. “Here’s the original, so translate it, and everyone thinks that’s just as it should be. What’s the problem, if you can arrange them prettily together on the bookshelf? But what does original mean then, there’s an original only because someone sits down to grapple with it, otherwise there wouldn’t even be an original.”

Subjective idealism, Titus thought.

“But if the original isn’t the original,” Martin asked, “what is it?”

“The original on the bookshelf is nothing more than printed paper,” Rudolf Böhme stated. “The moment you open it and start reading, things get complicated.”

“Maybe you could give them a hint of what it is you’re translating,” Bernadette’s mother said, after having lit yet another cigarette.

“And there’s the problem right off,” Rudolf Böhme declared. “The Bacchae by Euripides, the Bacchantes, The Possessed, or The Frenzied —or what should I call them? Do you understand?”

“No,” Martin said.

“If I say the Bacchantes, then I see Jordaens’s painting before me, and Bacchus reminds me of Caravaggio, of a Bacchus not feeling so well — and what does that have to do with Dionysus?”

“Then choose a different word,” Martin said.

“Which one?”

“Whatever’s in the dictionary.”

“Whatever’s in the dictionary?” Rudolf Böhme asked, closing his eyes. “In the dictionary you’ll find: ‘bacchic: frenzied, roisterous, bewitched, possessed,’ something like that.”

“And what fits?”

“Yes, which of them fits?” Rudolf Böhme looked at his plate. “We had a joke in school,” he began. “The ancient Greeks didn’t know the most important thing of all: that they are the ‘ancient Greeks.’ Do you understand? Time, which turned the Greeks into the ‘ancient Greeks,’ keeps bringing to light new meanings the Greeks themselves, of course, knew nothing about, could never have known about, although the words came from them. I see in them something different than you do, and Mama sees something else entirely. And our friend Titus here, he would find some other facet to be of significance. Each person has his own experiences, and so he reads the same sentences very differently.”

“Is that true, Titus?” Martin asked.

“Yes, that’s true,” Titus said in a serious voice.

“Yes, that’s true,” Martin aped him.

“A text is not a dead thing,” Rudolf Böhme continued, “but rather it answers my questions in its own special way, or refuses to answer. There’s a voice in there, an encounter, a conversation…”

“Wow!” Martin exclaimed. “The witching hour for the bewitched.”

Bernadette’s mother shook her head and angrily exhaled a puff of smoke.

“He’s right, Sophie,” Rudolf Böhme remarked before Bernadette’s mother could say anything. “Reading is always the witching hour.”

“And so what’s this bewitched play about?” Titus asked.

“That would just spoil our evening,” Bernadette’s mother said.

“In any case it was Goethe’s favorite tragedy, but it’s cruel, it’s gray

[Letter of May 25, 1990]

“And now I’ve lost my train of thought. Well fine,” he said, and placed his forefingers at the edge of the table, flexing them outward like horns. “Dionysus takes on human form — it’s important that he’s welcomed in human form — and arrives in Thebes in order to bring his cult to the city of his mother, Semele. All Asia worships him by now, only Greece still knows nothing about him. Semele, one of Zeus’s lovers, had given in to Hera’s whispered suggestion and demanded that Zeus show himself in all his divinity. Zeus appeared as a bolt of lightning that struck and killed Semele. But her sisters, Dionysus’s aunts, claim this story was merely invented by Cadmus, Semele’s father and the founder of Thebes, in order to preserve the honor of his daughter, and thus of the royal house as well. In truth Zeus struck Semele down because she had bragged that she was pregnant by him. Dionysus doesn’t like any of this gossip. That is why, so Dionysus says, he has turned the women of Thebes into frenzied Maenads and driven them off to a nearby heavily wooded mountain, Cithaeron. Dionysus demands the Thebans believe in him…”

“Which, as a god, he’s allowed to do,” Joachim inserted.

“If he were to reveal himself as a god, yes,” Rudolf Böhme rejoined. “Pentheus is the ruler of Thebes and a cousin of Dionysus, since his mother Agave is one of Semele’s sisters. Cadmus is thus the grandfather of both Pentheus and Dionysus. Pentheus is a god-, or perhaps better”—here he gave Joachim a nod—“gods-fearing man. It is only to Dionysus that he fails to offer sacrifices and prayers. Although to be fair, one should add that Pentheus knows nothing whatever about him.”

Bernadette had stood up and, while Rudolf Böhme described the first commentary of the chorus, began to clear the table. Titus stacked the plate of the girl next to him on his own and pushed his chair back.