This Translation Tuesday, we are privy to Swiss writer Gianna Rovere’s intimate musings on her encounters with elephants in a year— from overheard conversations on the train to a trip to Ikea. In direct prose, deftly translated from the German by Regan Mies, Rovere imbues her daily life with whimsy through the simple act of noticing in “Incidents of Everyday Elephants.”
November 12, 2020: Toys
I’ve always thought elephants made sense on children’s products and as toys because they have such a practical shape for small hands: a slender trunk for a child’s tight grip; an arched spine to be stroked; and four sturdy legs that stand solid and firm. Lovely, round shapes. I recently met a friend again for the first time in a while, and we got to talking about it all. Toys, elephants. He had cancer. Chemotherapy, hair all fallen out, weighed a hundred kilograms. He’d just become infertile. My friend’s doctor gave him a special offer, so now his sperm’s waiting for his cue from a nitrogen tank in Bern, in case the infertility stays. And what have I been doing? Looking for elephants in everyday life. Do you know, then, why they’re so often pictured on kids’ products? my friend asked. He said, My father’s worked in marketing for quite some time now and told me once, during a visit to the zoo, that elephants have positive connotations all over the world. So that’s why. Sure, dogs might be cute here, but in Asia, they’re dirty.
February 4, 2021: Relocation
I’m transporting an Ikea bag brimming with elephants. I’ve strapped it down onto two moving boxes, each of which I’ve tied tightly to a bike trailer. Forty-six elephants; small and large, made of porcelain, wood, or wax. I pull the trailer unhurriedly behind me. Halfway across the crosswalk at Albisriederplatz, I get a call. I hold the phone between my cheek and shoulder, and the elephants tip slowly left. At the last second, I catch their fall with my free hand. A car honks. Apologetic, I raise my hand, and the elephants spill down onto the asphalt. It sounds like broken glass.
February 23, 2021: New Message
Today, I was once again offered an elephant via telegram. A saltshaker.
February 28, 2021: Level
On the train to Luzern, a well-dressed man asks his son, who’s playing on a tablet:
“So’ve you managed to do it yet, with the little elephant like that?”
March 13, 2021: Matriarchy
The author Maggie Nelson writes in her book The Argonauts that during her pregnancy, despite everything, she was surprised her own body could bear a masculine body. Later, on a blog for elephant fans, I read: “Dominant female elephants are more likely to have female offspring.” The blog post contradicts the biological theory that a male parent’s sex chromosomes are the only thing responsible for the genitals of mammal offspring. It suggests that, because the female invests so much more energy into her cub’s upbringing, she certainly wouldn’t be indifferent to whether she would be raising a male or female. I wonder if this has something to do it the matriarchy elephants live in. I could make a comparison to the more patriarchal regions of our human world, where a disproportionate number of female fetuses are aborted since families want male descendants. This question of whether a fetus’ genitals could be influenced by the outside comes up in all sorts of places—sitcoms, even. Like this, for example: M doesn’t want to have a daughter, because he’s scared she’ll be sexualized by men. He gets some tips from his father who, like his grandfather, has only fathered sons: Avoid lemons, eat pickled herring, dip your testicles into ice water, and have sex in the direction north. According to another theory, X-chromosome sperm are slower than Y-chromosome sperm, so they should be able to survive longer. If that’s the case, you’d have better chances of a girl when the act of procreation takes place just before ovulation.
April 19, 2021: Breasts
Under my mask, beads of sweat form on my upper lip. I try to lick them away and leave behind an uncomfortably cool trail of saliva I have to wipe dry with my hand through my mask. I’m standing at the barrier of the elephant enclosure, surrounded on all sides by children lifted high into the air. A calf suckles from the full breasts between its mother’s front legs. I’m irritated at the sight, irritated that I had expected an udder like a cow’s.
June 6, 2021: Blue
Hannah says: I associate your name with the color blue.
Eva says: Blue is an elephant color.
July 17, 2021: Coming-of-Age
Sus tells us at dinner that elephants have always been her favorite animal. Elegant is the wrong word. Maybe exceptional, extraordinary. No, actually, exalted. Eva says she’s never understood her mother’s obsession with elephants. Sus answers: “And your favorite animal is a tiger!” Eva shrugs her shoulders in my direction: “It was, but now it’s a cat.”
September 11, 2021: Swan Lake
In the Giswil station hotel, Glynis sits on the corner of the bed farthest from the desk. I sit in the chair and watch her out of the corner of my eye, how she burrows into her suitcase. The room has blue-gray wall-to-wall carpeting with constellations of little yellow dots, on which there are two dark bedframes we’ve shyly pulled twenty centimeters apart from one another. Glynis is a delicate, nearly transparent woman. The bridge of her nose slopes steeply, her hair is gray-blonde. I ask her which performance she’ll be presenting tomorrow. That’s when she opens up: She was a ballet dancer at the Zürich Opera House for twenty years. But not any longer, now that she’s old. She has danced in Swan Lake at least forty times. Never as the Swan Queen. She tells me that open-toed dancers used to put veal into their pointe shoes. Meat against meat to mitigate the pain. Sometimes, when she’d had an especially bad day, she’d toss rehearsal aside, take the train to Basel, and visit the zoo. There was a wonderful café between the elephant enclosure and the great apes. It was lovely, colonial-style, all draped in jungle vines. When she was there, it was as if she had never traveled to Basel but rather taken a train directly into the Serengeti. When, years later, she moved to Basel, full of anticipation for that specific feeling of foreignness, the café had disappeared.
Translated from the German by Regan Mies.
Gianna Rovere is a freelance writer, curator, and cultural journalist—an observer and describer of intimate situations and scenes in public spaces. She grew up in sleepy Luzerner Rottal and has lived as a self-proclaimed city dweller in Bern, Brüssels, Luzern, and currently Zürich, where she’s studying for a Master’s in cultural journalism at Zurich University of the Arts.
Regan Mies lives in New York and works as an editorial assistant. She is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she studied German language and literature, political science, and creative writing. Her translations, short fiction, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in No Man’s Land, Necessary Fiction, On the Seawall, Litro Mag, Quarto, and Columbia’s In the Margins.
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