Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

It’s impossible to say whether he’s gliding through this stretch of land or whether the stretch of land is running through him, whether the travelers are driving the landscape past them or the landscape is throwing the travelers out of it; or whether the region is perhaps just leaning back, has leaned back into the general background.

Outside, on a path through the fields running alongside the tracks, Burgmüller sees a few people waving at the train, one of them waving directly at him, greeting him very warmly and lovingly, showing careful concern, as if he were an acquaintance who was particularly fond of him; then suddenly he sees that beside this man outside the train, who seems more and more familiar to him, a woman is standing, whose gaze explains everything to him, and it’s as if he, sitting alone here on the train, is waving at himself and his own girlfriend, whom he has found again, outside, they’re standing on the path along the tracks, and as he waves back right away, to himself and to her, she then gives him a sign, tries to throw a few puzzling words after him with her hands, as if she wanted to tell him, right at the last moment, before the train is out of sight, that she will get on at the next station, or something like that, while the train keeps getting farther away and disappears into the hazy wing-beat of a hill upon the steppe.

Far behind him, the city suddenly swells up like a huge puffball that then explodes at the edge of the forest of air, as if its houses were crumbling in on themselves, or else bursting into brick-red clouds, accompanied by wall-chunks piling up on top of each other from far and near and then being strewn apart; they’re swaying through the trembling, melting light astonishingly slowly, or is it rather a waving, yes, it could be considered a form of waving after the disappearing train, as if by stony figures whose silhouettes, standing out more and more distinctly, are swaying and moving complacently away from the disintegrated edges of the city while waving after Burgmüller, who is waving back to them as if taking his leave until they meet again through the fractured time of that stranded day:

So the caryatids did awaken to the great sleep war after all, together with the atlantes they have begun the sleep war of the telamones against the inhabitants of the city, they have stepped away from their houses (is that why they sent him away on this trip?); or is this only the burning sleep of the desperately gleaming afternoon light, which has heated up as it burned down: are its atomized ruins causing the whole country behind it to swell up in this smoke-dust weather until the storm-twilight front of an incoming air mass drives this sunbeam-mushroom network apart? (Or is it the mean, fecal smirk of a president going senile, a president of a so-called new world: the grin that in his countries, illuminated every day from heaven above with his directives, elevated to law, determines the weather — has that grin now also crossed the ocean and broken out devastatingly there as that firmamental fit of laughter on the splintering horizon?)

Gliding past now is a lake whose surface is as smooth as if the water had begun to freeze, to congeal into a solid body in the heat of this summer, to a block of mirrors buried in the land. On the hard surface of the lake, which seems polished, rowboats, sailboats and windsurfboards are locked in. They wriggle like fluttering, buzzing flies in amber, or creep like awakening fossils through the mica schist of the mountains

The lake does not mirror the chain of hills surrounding it, but rather a mountain that seems to be deeply fissured, as if the eye of this stretch of water could see what had to remain hidden to Burgmüller, even on this trip; or were the mountains very far away mirrored in the sky in such a way that their silhouettes had fallen back down exactly into this lake again?

He feels the region as closely around his skin as if he were being embraced. His eyes are already quite tired from being so amazed, limp with exhaustion from awakening too often, they stay open now as if they were fixed in that position, so that they don’t constantly have to be pried apart again; with open eyes through blind windows. . underway, but not of his own volition, without all too painful a departure, brought to a stop without having noticed the motion of the trip. . to a layover deprived of arrival. . as if everything could fall away back into oneself

Sad serenity accompanies everything he has overcome, all the painful fulfillments of the confident denials sent in his direction, and he has the firm feeling, only because he has so carefully gotten lost, that he will soon find himself at last, which is what he has always been seeking to do.

In the meantime, the region has become so visible at a glance that you can’t keep anything clearly in view anymore.

Soon, he thinks, we will have completely dissolved in it, when my skin is the skin of the sky at the point where dawn and dusk take place simultaneously, when I feel the sky above me more and more as my own skin somehow pulled lightly over my head, like a fur coat pulled over my ears.

Much that is now invisible will soon be very easy to discover, because everything has suddenly become so transparent that one can’t see through anything anymore.

GERT JONKEis counted among Austria’s most important authors and dramatists. Among other honors, he received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Erich Fried Prize, and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature. He died in 2009 at the age of 62.

JEAN M. SNOOKlives with her husband on the easternmost tip of North America, the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland, where she has taught German language and literature at Memorial University since 1984. She received the 2009 Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize as well as the 2011 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for her translation of Gert Jonke’s The Distant Sound.