For the fourth instalment of our Saturday column, In This Together, we present three diary entries from renowned Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn. Below, Hahn introduces us to Tavares’ work and the background behind his stream-of-consciousness diary that, written like a prose poem, records the daily changes of the pandemic experience:
The novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares is, like most of us, stuck at home. He is in Portugal, from where since March 23 he’s been writing a daily “Plague Diary.” As each piece is finished, it gets translated—sometimes overnight—into several languages for publication around the world. I have the good fortune of being one of the translators. To date he has written (and I’ve translated) thirty-two pieces, including the three that you can read below.
Gonçalo is one of the Portuguese world’s most critically acclaimed writers. José Saramago tipped him as the next Lusophone winner of the Nobel, saying, “Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. This, combined with a language entirely his own, mingling bold invention and a mastery of the colloquial, means that it would be no exaggeration to say . . . that there is very much a before Gonçalo M. Tavares and an after.” But while he has a stellar reputation in many languages, he is as yet frustratingly underappreciated in English. So if he’s new to you, I should say, perhaps, that this writing project is not typical of Gonçalo’s work—but then, I don’t know whether any one piece of his work is typical of his work, come to that. All are extraordinary, as I think this one is.
Each entry seems to take you through a single day’s experience—stepping-stone by stepping-stone—an observation, a piece of news, a thought that gets followed down a rabbit-hole, a bit of culture consumed, a recurring, niggling worry—in a way that partly recreates the peculiarly time-adrift days so many of us are experiencing; unstructured days filled with tiny moments (another news alert, an e-mail from a friend, stop to pat the dog, time perhaps for another coffee), but threaded together with some really subtle, almost invisible artfulness. Each day reads alone, but the best effect is cumulative, each piece slightly developing and illuminating what’s gone before. The writer is looking far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global as well as intimate; its ingredients include utter banality, yet even that banality is woven into something weirdly engrossing, sometimes distressing, sometimes strangely comforting.
One day we will be living in a place where this whole project can be published all together as a book, to be read for its artistry and its thoughtfulness and as a reminder of who we were in the spring of 2020; but in the meantime, while we are still living in the present that it describes, I have felt its entries gradually becoming one of the richest ways I daily connect with the rest of the world (absent any of the old possibilities). I hope readers can find those connections for themselves here, too.
Extracts from “Plague Diary”
by Gonçalo M. Tavares
6 April
Human number 486 died in a Madrid hospital.
Lists of the dead.
Lists of chosen books.
A list of places to visit after the plague, when it is the anxiety that is driven away and not the bodies.
Ten pages in the newspaper with pictures of people with two dates.
Jacob Steinberg, Israeli poet: “we look tonight like a city in flames.”
I need gauze for the wounds of humans and animals and I consult a link.
“https://www.mifarma.pt/gasas-suaves-hansaplast-10-uds-85m-x-5cm.”
In the details, the link says the following:
“For looking, mole suggestion to clean and collect wounds.”
Later: “Individuals sterile wrapping.”
Then, the clincher. How to use it:
“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”
“Use or cure the Hansaplast look to fix a look on nowhere.”
“Apply a new one, I think that less hair daily.”
All instructions should be like this.
Instructions from a lunatic for other lunatics.
I like automatic translators that move into high aesthetics without knowing it.
“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”
Clean the surface of an animal’s leg or a human arm well.
Carefully clean and then apply the look.
With a certain strength.
I try this on Roma’s leg.
Medicine that carefully cleans the surrounding area and then applies the look.
The ancients were men who applied the look.
It didn’t work.
My Greek friend tells me that a few days ago, at the refugee camp in Ritsona, a woman tested positive for coronavirus when she went to give birth in a public hospital.
Only then did they realise that many in the camp were infected.
Quarantine. The baby reveals things.
The good soldier Svejk and the description of the lunatic asylum:
“one very educated inventor . . . who spent his life picking his nose and only said once a day: I’ve just invented electricity.”
The raving and badly translated ad for the gauze reminded me of that madman who invented electricity once a day.
When this is over, the outside world is going to be full of crazy people, daily inventors of electricity.
In Italy the government has given approval for all students to pass their year.
In Sweden there are fears of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.
Somebody asks: If you lose your desire, would you go looking for it?
Where?
Alexander Kluge talks about a doll “where the eyes” tell you the time.
Seeing the right time in the eyes of the doll.
Seeing the right time in the eyes of some old men on television.
At certain moments, clocks seem to stop working.
All that work are human eyes.
In Italy, everybody who goes out onto the street has the right time in their eyes.
In Spain too.
And in other places. In the United States.
I receive a link: click on a year and the most listened-to songs of that time will come up.
It’s called “nostalgia machine.”
A collective nostalgia machine.
Jung, explicit in do re mi.
I click on 1986.
The choices are terrible.
From Phil Collins to Samantha Fox.
Sometimes it’s better to lose our memory: memory 0.0
Two days ago in India: “Thousands of people flee to escape hunger.”
The factories are closed, almost everything quarantined.
Thousands quit the capital and return to their village.
There aren’t enough buses.
Reports in the Guardian. Many had to return on foot.
200 kilometres from New Delhi.
“The road seemed endless . . . and my children just took short breaks sleeping on the ground,” Mamta explained.
The only thing that kept us moving was that we had nowhere else to go, said Mamta.
The only thing.
“Each day a deeper rebirth,” the painter used to say, quoting a master.
The following day, in the same place, but sunk deeper.
With just your head out.
That’s how you learn: with just your head out.
Boris Johnson has been put into intensive care.
The Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will take his place.
They’re talking about 15 million new unemployed people in the United States.
I return to my book.
“Take five steps forward and five steps back,” says a doctor at the asylum of the good soldier Svejk.
It is a test to see whether the man is crazy or not.
I try to do this.
We should all do this.
Five steps forward and five steps back to see if we stay in the same place.
We don’t stay in the same place.
It’s no longer possible to stay in the same place.
*
8 April
All Mexican women are in love with the undersecretary of health, Hugo López-Gatell.
From a friend of mine in Mexico City, she was the one who verified this.
He speaks every evening at 7:00 p.m.
All the women, of all ages, are in love.
Married, single, widows.
He’s charming and intelligent, they say.
He’s a combo, they add. He has everything all in one.
There are photos of him all over Mexico and circulating on the internet, in different poses and suits.
And with the caption:
“I’ll protect you”
“I’m telling you to stay home”
“I’d be happy to explain it to you”
And another one, with a mean (“but very lovely”) expression, with the caption: “I saw you went out!”, as if Hugo López-Gatell were reproaching a citizen for not staying home.
Many men are also in love with him, says my friend from Mexico.
“He’s so supergorgeous our doctor.”
“I fell in love with him from the start of Covid-19 and since then I’ve done what Hugo López-Gatell says.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese city of Wuhan reopened this Wednesday.
The residents can go out “so long as they prove they are healthy.”
The New York Times says that “the first trains are leaving this morning.”
The singer Gilberto Gil and his granddaughter Flor Gil sing at home, sitting down, “Volare.”
Gilberto Gil stops playing his guitar and the two of them say at the end: Noi siamo Italia.
Flor Gil is eleven and has green hair.
Gilberto Gil is seventy-seven and has a lovely gentleness. He lowers his voice so that his granddaughter’s voice can be heard.
“Donato Sabia, former European indoor 800-metre champion (1984) died this Wednesday, aged fifty-six, a victim of the novel coronavirus.”
“Giulia, the daughter of ‘patient one’ in Italy, was born.”
Egypt is the first Arab country to suspend public activities in Ramadan.
And Israel announces isolation and curfew during Passover.
“In order to avoid families getting together for the traditional Pesach dinner, on Wednesday night, the government has also announced a curfew.”
The spatial guidance is clear:
“Nobody can be more than 100 metres from their respective homes.”
I imagine taking regular steps to measure a hundred metres from home the way we used to do to mark out football goalposts with stones.
I hear Cazuza: “your swimming pool is full of rats.”
He died in 1990 of AIDS.
They announce: “Bernie Sanders has quit the democratic race for the White House.”
And “founder of Twitter donates almost a third of his fortune to support economic recovery.”
I circle around an idea as though an idea occupied space.
The huge cathedral of St John the Divine in Manhattan is going to be transformed into a field hospital.
The hospitals in New York are filling up.
The churches are starting to get ready.
Clifton Daniel, the dean, explained to the New York Times: over the centuries the cathedral has been used several times in this way.
And then he said: it’s not new for the cathedral, it’s only new for us.
The cathedral and the human beings.
The cathedral is more experienced than this generation. It’s seen this before.
What is new to humans is not new to the stone.
Boris Johnson is stable and “responding to treatment.”
I notice now, the window that looks out the front is stuck; the windows that look out the back work.
We’ve got to get the window that looks out front opening firmly, I think.
“Africa exceeds 500 dead and records more than 10,500 infected.”
And Argentina extends quarantine to the end of April.
The quarantines follow one another.
Eto’o, a Cameroonian footballer, talks about the idea of trialling vaccines in Africa.
We aren’t guinea pigs, son of a bitch, he says.
Every day at 7:00 p.m., says my friend from Mexico, the women sit down in front of the television.
We are sad and tense, listening.
But once or twice out comes a “How lovely he is! So handsome.”
From my grandmother, from my sister or from me.
We are all together, just women.
Sometimes we say, poor little thing!
We wouldn’t have wanted him, Hugo López-Gatell, to be in that position.
A lot of responsibility, she says.
I receive a message with a picture.
The church of a Brazilian sect is closed and there is a piece of paper saying, in red: coronavirus notice.
And below: we are notifying you that the gatherings for the curing of illnesses are cancelled because of this illness.
A lesson in language.
In Mexico, there are some stickers going around with red superhero rays coming out of Hugo López-Gatell’s eyes, with the caption “Health Ray.”
He doesn’t just inform us, says my friend.
We watch Hugo López-Gatell at 7:00 p.m., she says, and we are cured.
You’re just pieces of shit, says the footballer Eto’o.
Africa isn’t your playground, says the footballer Eto’o.
And a song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Tp_TmjHRs
*
10 April
Two captains will sink a ship.
I imagine a crowd raising a finger, nice and high, as if to say: one, we only want one.
Zero captains will immobilise a ship.
Neither two, nor zero.
One is fine.
“From any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.”
But people are waking up tired, like old horses.
A lot of teenagers are shaving off their hair.
A friend told me she cut off her eyebrows to see how she looked.
Since she has nobody with her, having eyebrows or not is not important.
I’ll never have another opportunity to try this, she says.
I am reading Time of the Magicians, by Eilenberger, about the philosophers Benjamin, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein at a certain point became devout.
He would teach classes to children in a small town lost in the mountains.
Placing his watch down on the desk at the start of the class, he would say: let us pray.
He would close his eyes and begin:
“Holy Spirit, on us bestow
Your gracious light. We meekly ask
That we henceforth may onward go
Always striving in our task.
Help us duly learn our parts
And in goodness keep our hearts.”
The most brilliant philosopher of the twentieth century, eyes closed and hands together, praying.
A philosopher who closes his eyes, before teaching the children.
A rapid synthesis of stripping away.
Suspending sight and clarity, abdicating control: closing eyes.
And then trying to teach those who are just beginning.
I put on Georges Brassens, “La Mauvaise Réputation.”
Belief and heresy.
Wittgenstein was a bad-tempered man. He was not easy.
But it’s not enough to be easily irritated to be a philosopher.
You cannot reason on shouting alone, I say and laugh.
I have started whispering secrets in my own ear. It only takes a few weeks to make a lunatic. It’s not as hard as all that.
After all this, we need to tell the living not to go out onto the street in zigzags.
They alone will have a hold on understanding the way, without trembling too much.
Eilenberger describes one episode in detail.
Once Wittgenstein got so annoyed that he “struck one pupil on the head with his exercise book.”
And he hit him for so long that the book “fell apart and the pages fluttered loosely” to the classroom floor.
What was the boy’s terrible fault?
Nothing to do with the alphabet or arithmetic.
No fault of logical reasoning.
Wittgenstein had merely asked where Jesus was born.
And the boy had answered: Jerusalem.
Wittgenstein became furious: there is no mistake like this mistake.
For the week, movies by Tarkovsky, Sokurov, and Rossellini.
The filmmaker Eisenstein and a line that’s always struck me: “Don’t drink water unless it’s boiling.”
Why did he say this? I don’t know.
He was a student, he was seventeen.
At that age you only drink things that are boiling.
I drink coffee and coffee. No sugar, a simple bomb.
The third? The third coffee.
I put on the Paco Ibáñez version, “La mala reputación.”
En mi pueblo sin pretensión / Tengo mala reputación.
“In my modest little town / I’ve got a bad rep I can’t live down.”
A line from Wittgenstein: he says he ought to have done something positive with his life, to have become a star in the sky.
After all, he says, “I remained stuck on earth and now I am gradually fading out.”
Remaining stuck on earth and slowly fading out.
I return to 2020. Ibáñez.
Yo no pienso pues hacer ningún daño / Queriendo vivir fuera del rebaño.
“I mean no harm, you can take my word, / By wanting to live outside the herd.”
New York, on Hart Island, in the borough of the Bronx.
An island once used as a prison camp.
A drone captures the picture.
Employees hired by the city administration gently lowering white coffins into a large hole.
The work is normally done by prisoners, “but the increased number of bodies has forced them to hire specialist contractors.”
Many of these employees were taken on in the last few days.
Seen from a distance it could look like the start of the foundations of a new building.
You need to dig first before you can rise.
But there are no risings here.
For now, at least, the bodies are only going down.
Victims who have not been identified or whose families don’t have the money for a funeral.
That’s what a pauper’s grave is: being in the middle of a crowd even after you’re dead.
It is not about having no name, but about having no privacy even in the moments that follow the final moment.
I breathe.
Why did you shave your eyebrows, I ask.
The girl sends a text with the symbol of somebody shrugging.
Zane Powles, a British teacher, “has been walking more than five miles every day to deliver meals to his pupils’ homes.”
He also takes them some homework.
“That we henceforth may onward go
Always striving in our task.”
And in goodness keeping our hearts. Wittgenstein’s prayer.
“The method is very simple: Powles puts the lunch down on the ground,” he knocks on the door “and then he waits on the pavement or in the garden for somebody to open the door and take the meal.”
In the town of Grimsby, 34 percent of children live in poverty.
These children, from Western Primary School, are entitled to free school meals.
So Powles walks those five miles and delivers food and homework.
“The parents and children come to the window or the door to wave and say hello,” says Powles, a former soldier.
Powles walks loaded down with many rucksacks.
Afterwards he returns tired, but much faster.
Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
Published by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Witt. Other extracts from Gonçalo’s “Plague Diary” can be found at Granta, Words Without Borders, PEN Transmissions, Bookanista, and Daniel Hahn’s website.
Interested in submitting work to this Feature? We’re looking for literature in translation—specifically fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—that addresses the current pandemic. Send work under 2,500 words directly to blog@asymptotejournal.com. General submission guidelines apply.
Portuguese novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in Luanda in 1970 and is one of the most preeminent contemporary European writers, with his work published in more than fifty countries. Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011) received the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) in France in 2010. Other novels, including A Voyage to India (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016) have been nominated for renowned French literary awards, such as the Prix Femina Étranger and the Prix Médicis. Alberto Manguel has called Tavares “one of the most ambitious writers of this century.”
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His work has won him the International Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Blue Peter Book Award and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others. His most recent book is a translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me.
*****
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