Can’t get enough of our Swiss Literature Feature in Asymptote’s Summer 2022 issue? This Translation Tuesday, travel with French-speaking Swiss writer Bruno Pellegrino into the garden of Gustave Roud’s. Lose yourself in a giddying array of flowers and names in this extract from the opening of the Prix Alice Rivaz-winning novel, an evocative passage that demonstrates a poet and a botanist’s keen vision of the natural world. Translator and former contributor Elodie Olson-Coons walks us through the novel’s rhythms in a beautiful introduction to a fascinating book.
“Shaped around the life of Swiss poet and photographer Gustave Roud and his sister Madeleine, Bruno Pellegrino’s August is an Autumn Month (Editions Zoé, 2018) is a tender, intimate opus: half lyrical biography, half archival fiction, intermittently illuminated by the author’s gentle, wry perspective (“If you want to get anywhere, Gus, you’ll have to pull yourself together,” he tells his character at one point). The book’s delicate framework—brother and sister, rural house and garden, 1962 to 1972 —is brought to life by the ebb and flow of the seasons, a Woolfian texture that gives its undivided attention to the botanical and the domestic. Moving like ghosts through their old family home, surrounded by traces of dreams long-abandoned and tender words unspoken, Gustave and Madeleine’s days are given life by the simplest details: a shift in morning light, a cup of linden flower tea going cold.”
—Elodie Olson-Coons
The time of foxgloves is over. As soon as Gustave touches the petals, even with his usual gentleness, the flowers crumple or come apart, soft as tissue paper, rolling paper. Foxgloves, that’s what they called them on their childhood farm; he doesn’t remember when he started thinking of them as digitalis. The courtyard is scattered with them, as if a storm has been and gone. It’ll need sweeping. But first, a more pressing concern: the inventory must be performed.
He goes through the gate and, notebook in hand, moves into the gardens exuding metallic odours—unless they are his own, his breath, his combed-back hair, effluvia caught in his shirt collar or the impeccable folds of his trousers, who knows. Since passing sixty (and that was a while ago now), he isn’t sure of anything anymore. He straightens his long, bent figure.
Ordered according to the demands of the varietals and the texture of the soil, the garden obeys a precise architecture: vegetables alternate with lilies, verbena, poppies; climbing plants shelter the more fragile elements; the perfume of the marigolds frightens away vermin. But the lushness of this jungle is sometimes difficult to contemplate. The glance hesitates in the face of such abundance—long gourds unrolling across the lawn of wild reseda and Japanese anemones—and this morning, something else means that, for the space of a few seconds, Gustave is overcome by the scale of the task. No storm after all, the night was a calm one; it’s only that, at dawn, dew settled delicately across the estate, crystallising into a white frost. It doesn’t seem particularly significant and yet, three days before the September equinox, everything is already condemned.
To give himself courage, Gustave makes himself notice the towering bed of zinnias. No doubt he would be surprised to learn that this species will be the first to flower in orbit, in January 2016, on board the International Space Station, tight petals unfurling, photosynthesis stirred by the clear violet light of electroluminescent diodes. Bewildered, awed or incredulous, perhaps—but he won’t ever know. He’ll be long dead by then: assuming this is really September 1962, as he writes the word zinnias in his notebook, he has just fourteen years left to live.
Espaliered trees grow along the house’s long façade. It’s maybe eight in the morning, the light is pale. Under Mother’s window, the walnut tree, stripped bare. Gustave writes: Chinese asters, phlox hedge, cactus, summer amaryllis. He doesn’t need to describe them, or even sketch them; just from the shape of the names he can make out the stiffness of the stems, the shades of white, the serrated edges of the leaves—lobed, arcuate, lorate, oval, whorled, lanceolate. He doesn’t write about the odours. Doesn’t mention the vegetables mingling with the flowers either: not a word on the lettuces gone to seed, nor on the ancient onions, the first bulb of which was originally transplanted more than a half-century since from the garden of their childhood farm.
Glazed with dew, the earth crackles under the soles of his shoes. Watching his steps, he passes close by the garden shed and skirts the central hedge of salmon and apricot dahlias framed by marigolds of an unearthly orange: his Mexican flowers, as he calls them. Just like the ones in those Douanier Rousseau paintings he saw in Paris a long time ago—where he would be the snake charmer girl, that looming black silhouette playing the flute by the riverbank, at the edge of an exuberant forest overgrown with plants shaped like hearts, like bells, like blades, like fans. A jungle, yes. He walks back along the flowerbeds bordering the house; his notebook now contains the words wallflower and rudbeckia. Song thrushes hurry along the boundary wall, the scarlet globe of a geranium comes alight, he writes this down. But no, the snake charmer would be Madeleine, of course, he would be at best that pink and grey bird in the bottom corner of the painting, with the hunted look of an endangered species. He slowly crushes the frozen flowers, petals coating the underside of his shoes.
The frost was ruthless. The tiger lily has rusted, the robust late-summer gladioli have wilted, brutally. Even the rot hemming certain leaves is suspended, stopped in its tracks by the ice. The orange tree will need to be brought indoors, stiff in its wooden box. He prays it’s not too late. The first pears are ripening, but their time is running out too, Gustave knows. He is keeping an urgent record of the names of things coming to an end.
Leaving the garden, he finds himself before the foxgloves in the courtyard once more. Seeing them in this state, little purple mounds on the ground, it’s hard to believe how deadly they are. His aunt warned him, one day long ago: just one taste and your heart stops.
It may be his very first memory, dating back, then, to the final years of the nineteenth century. Chickens making themselves comfortable in the old kitchen of their childhood farm, a half-full soup tureen swinging in the vast fireplace. He’s two or three years old and is watching his aunt crouching, aristocratically vast skirts forming a corolla around her drawn-in form. She has set whole bouquets of foxgloves boiling: the flowers twist, melt, settle and shrink. It works like white magic, this brew; she’ll use it to smear the cracks in the paving stones to stop the dead, under there, from holding sway. Just one taste and your heart stops. Where is Madeleine? Sitting on the ground, Gustave plays with a flower he has saved from the cauldron. If it’s a glove, you must be able to wear it: his little fingers look for a way to sink into the cluster.
Today, September 19th, Gustave is standing in front of the house, under the grapevines transfigured to red, foxgloves lying at his feet, notebook in hand, and I see him again as a child, fingers clad in flowers.
Translated from the French by Elodie Olson-Coons
Bruno Pellegrino is the author of Comme Atlas (2015), the prizewinning Là-bas, août est un mois d’automne (2018), and Dans la ville provisoire (2021), all published by Éditions Zoé. He lives between Lausanne and Berlin.
Elodie Olson-Coons is a writer, editor and bookseller based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. She tweets @elllode.
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