Early in her lyrical memoir, The Communicating Vessels, Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker has a crisis of faith: “And will anyone even read this . . . ?” she wonders. “. . . I see no goal, everything I touch, take up, after 1 short time seems flat and plain . . .” This kind of mid-project despair should sound familiar to many a writer—when the work feels futile, and the motivation to do it sapped.
But in some respects, Mayröcker had no choice but to write The Communicating Vessels. After the death of Ernst Jandl, her partner and collaborator of nearly half a century, Mayröcker took to the page to process her grief. She didn’t write her way out of pain so much as through it: in Vessels and its companion And I Shook Myself a Beloved, recently compiled together and published in English by A Public Space, the poet documents and reflects on her mourning process, her memories, and her daily life without Jandl.
Mayröcker’s style—unfettered, freely associative—can intimidate some readers. Literary translator Alexander Booth, on the other hand, was immediately captivated. In his masterly translation of Vessels, a work that confidently flouts grammatical rules and linguistic convention, Booth manages to enter Mayröcker’s mind and interpret her raw, cascading thoughts. It’s heartbreaking to witness her anguish and disorientation, while simultaneously astounding to revel in her complete liberation from the confines of language. In the following interview, I speak with Booth about the daunting, rewarding process of bringing Mayröcker to English-language readers.
—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor
Sophia Stewart (SS): The Communicating Vessels was in fact the first book of Mayröcker’s that you ever read, handed to you by a bookseller in Berlin over fifteen years ago. How did you come to translate Vessels? Did translating this book change at all your understanding of or relationship to her and her work?
Alexander Booth (AB): As with many things, it was a fairly circuitous path! I first encountered Mayröcker’s writing in Jerome Rothenberg’s and Pierre Joris’ anthology, Poems for the Millennium, and was intrigued. But living as I was in the US, finding her books in the original German was somewhat difficult. Then at the end of 2003 I moved to Berlin. I had nowhere to be, nowhere to go. The city was dark. There was snow and it was cold and I was unemployed and sleeping on a kitchen floor. Mostly I wanted to read. And fall in love. What I got was The Communicating Vessels. And so I more or less began to translate bits and pieces as soon as I could—but for myself, mind you, as a means of getting a better grip on what was going on.
Later, unpublished and unknown, I had absolutely no idea how to go about contacting publishers, much less how to approach journals with something in translation. After some not exactly encouraging responses and years of rejections, I mostly gave up. Then, at some point, I began to correspond with Nia Davies, who at that time, in 2014, was editor at Poetry Wales. She ended up publishing a few of the aforementioned bits and pieces in the journal in connection to a piece on Mayröcker—at ninety and being translated into Welsh. Then, in late 2015—more than ten years after having first begun—out of the proverbial blue I received an email from A Public Space inquiring as to whether I had any longer excerpts, and would I be interested in putting together a kind of expose, and it went from there.
I’m not sure that translating this book changed my understanding or relationship that much, no, aging and experience did just fine on their own. But I will say that there are very few writers who will truly change the way you approach reading and writing, indeed change your reading and writing, and whose works will continue to teach you in surprising ways, year after year. There are also very few writers you will remember where you were, when you were, how you were, upon first reading. It is no exaggeration to write that Mayröcker was one of them for me.
SS: The Communicating Vessels is composed of two paired works: the titular memoir plus And I Shook Myself A Beloved. How would you compare the experience of translating these distinct works? Was one more challenging than the other? Did one excite you more than the other?
AB: They are indeed rather distinct works, and were both quite challenging, albeit in different ways. But I think this makes sense in that, as far as I’m concerned, they also reflect different states of grieving, different experiences of traveling back and forth to the land of the dead and through various layers of memory. I can’t really say one excited me more than the other. Perhaps the individual bits of The Communicating Vessels are and were a bit easier to swallow, so to speak, and I do not find them to be particularly claustrophobic. And I Shook Myself A Beloved, on the other hand, is a bit more overwhelming, its cascading, obsessive waves of text and feeling, and yet it is precisely this form that allows it to work in a more incantatory mode perhaps, to enchant in ways the former cannot. I find Vessels to be very sculptural, rather spare, which appeals to my general aesthetic very much. Though—and I’m responding as a translator here—the longer I spent in Beloved, the more I began to appreciate the way it moved, its baroque overflow and fullness as a response, in part, to the presence, or rather fear of death, not unlike a textual mirroring of Rome, somewhere I have spent a lot of time (and, in this connection, as Mayröcker is Viennese, I also have to think of Freud, his idea of the palimpsest that is the city as a metaphor of the human mind). When it first came out and I was simply a reader, however, I just went all in, as they say. My hope is that readers of it in English are able to do the same. And return rather moved.
SS: Mayröcker can be hard enough to read, let alone translate. Her work often takes the form of fragments, or a stream of consciousness, or what Irish poet Peter Sirr calls a “continuous torrent of freely associative, passionate language.” You recognize this in the book’s Acknowledgements, writing that her “style is, to say the least, unique and an immense challenge to try and capture.” So how did you approach such a daunting translational task?
AB: “A continuous torrent” is definitely apt. Keep in mind that, in the end, the project was one that spanned a good fourteen years, four of which at least were spent pretty steadily in the presence of her work. So, I feel that I developed a fairly close relationship not only with the specific texts and their words, but with the general rhythm of their greater pulse. And that is what I tried to match to what’s possible in English—aware, of course, that I would inevitably fall short. But that that was okay. Something new would grow in the space.
SS: There are a great many photos online of Mayröcker in her home office. The room is just utter chaos, cluttered with innumerable books and papers that appear, at least to a casual observer, hopelessly disorganized. In every photo she sits in the midst of the mess—cool, composed, perhaps even proud of all the knowledge accumulated in this small space. To keep myself from a tangent, I’ll pose a two-part question: how do you think this workspace relates to or illuminates Mayröcker’s work, and how does your own workspace compare to hers?
AB: At one point in Vessels, Mayröcker wonders if her room resembles a Joseph Beuys installation. I don’t find that to be entirely accurate; for one, it’s too cluttered. Instead, the photos—and much of her process in general—remind me of the wonderful work of Kurt Schwitters: in particular, the transformation of his home in Hanover into what he called the Merzbau, an all-encompassing, living breathing walk-in collage. But, as the saying goes, I guess, one person’s nutty-hoarder-next-door is another person’s avant-garde visionary. Joking aside, I think that her physical—that is: manual, collage-like—approach to writing is very important. She has referred to the various trays where she keeps her various slips and scraps of paper scraps of phrases as her communicating vessels, and she does indeed use these materials, I think, in the manner of a visual artist, though one who arranges and rearranges to the musical phrase and the mind’s eye.
As for my own workspace, there is no comparison whatsoever! In the past, it was simply anywhere I could work at all, oftentimes just sitting on a couch, which I don’t recommend. Now, however, more often than not I work at a small foldable table in the small storage space off the small kitchen of my apartment. I too have amassed piles of books all over the place, true, but that’s about the extent of it.
SS: In the Acknowledgements you also mention that you’ve “done my best to recreate it faithfully, at times, however, opting perhaps more for my sense of musicality than ‘strict’ correspondence, in accordance with what I feel is its poetic and alchemical (or poetically alchemical) nature as a text.” Can you talk more about what this prioritization of musical sense over strict correspondence means to you?
AB: I always think of something I once heard the Italian poet and translator of Shakespeare Patrizia Cavalli say: just what exactly does fidelity in a translation even mean? In Mayröcker’s work, there are a few things one must consider: some of it is so internal, so personal, there is just no point of access, no port of entry—to paraphrase William Burroughs, seeing as that she is now ninety-six years old, she simply does not remember what she meant by certain things. You’ve seen the photos; even if she did have a “note” somewhere, how on earth would she find it? My point is: I think you just have to go on intuition, or, as I wrote, what you think works musically. After all, it’s the song one’s after in her work, not any kind of 1-2-3 related to plot or how-do-I-get-there-from-here. You’re worried about making it sing. Making it vibrate, hum. Or should be. Another way of putting it: its compelling transformation into the target language, which in turn transforms. After all, there is nothing worse than reading a book in translation, especially poetry, and thinking, “Huh. I’m sure it’s nice in the original.”
SS: How would you describe your different approaches to translating poetry (like Lutz Seiler’s In Field Latin, for which you received the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant) versus prose (novels like Navid Kermani’s Love Writ Large, Friedrich Ani’s The Nameless Day, Gunther Geltinger’s Moor). Since you yourself are also a poet, do you find translating poetry to be easier or more enjoyable?
AB: I try not to make too much of a distinction. Most texts have their poetry—or the majority of those that I have worked on have—it’s a question of releasing it. You have to listen hard, and long, and then try and carry that listening over. You’re channeling, really, a medium. Having said that—and I think this is important—all of the poetry projects I have done so far have been ones that I have chosen, not that I have been asked to do. Which is to say: I was not working as a translator when I first approached Mayröcker’s work, or Sandro Penna’s, or Lutz Seiler’s—I began to work on them when “in between” poems of my own, as the poet Charles Wright has said. In different ways I found the work electrifying and wanted to attempt to make it so in English—I’d figure out how to make it available to people at a later date. In each case, it had to do with passion. I was not attached to or associated with any institution (which remains true today), nor under contract or even in contact with any publishers; in fact, none of those things had even crossed my mind. When you work this way, what you have is time, and that is an immense luxury. And pleasure. As to the rest, persistence is all.
But to get back to your question, I guess I just find translating poetry easier, or have, in large part because of what I just mentioned; I would have a very hard time, I think, translating poetry I didn’t find exciting. Then there is being able to work on one poem at a time, or one poem a day, and then stepping away: it keeps me from feeling overwhelmed. Going into a writer’s novel—which is to say their head and heart—for three to six months is for me a very heavy proposition as well as a rather weighty form of possession. Overall, I just feel more comfortable with poetry. I recently came upon a line in a book by Nathaniel Mackey: “I tend to pursue resonance rather than resolution.” I think that’s something that almost all poets could even agree on. And as good a general statement of approach as I have yet to come across.
SS: In the decade and a half since you discovered Mayröcker, do you think she’s had any impact on your own work?
AB: Absolutely. I think a lack of impact would have been impossible and, in a selfish way, figuring out what that was or would be was certainly part of the initial attraction. Generally speaking, I suppose she opened up new ways for me to think about all that could go into a poem or prose, to echo Robert Hass, as well as new ways to consider line and breath and rhythm. And she certainly reinforced the idea of doing one’s own thing, no matter what.
Photo credit: Kike Redondo
Alexander Booth is a writer and translator who, after many years in Rome, lives in Berlin.
Sophia Stewart is the assistant interviews editor at Asymptote Journal. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and other venues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
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