Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a folding of dreamscape into landscape—a study of some of earth’s most majestic topographies through the discursive, vivid wanderings of a mind led by its own fascinations. Made up of just over five hundred notes, this compilation of observations, narratives, fantasies, and contemplations track a journey through the Alps in colours, in flanks and peaks, hearsay and memories, macabre moments of comedy, and a continual rumination on the crafting of writing and composing. These deft workings of language have been rendered into a fluid and chimeric English by Katy Derbyshire, and she speaks here of Mountainish’s scepticism of mountains, the beauty and comedic tone of the prose, and ‘little narrative islands’.
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Matthew Redman (MR): One of my favourite aspects of Mountainish is when the narrator talks about the mountains and her fear of them; there is a kind of a mistrust of the mountains poking through a lot of the time, expressing itself in a lack of awe, a lack of overwhelm. When she’s faced with these mountains, it’s more like she’s peering at them, or stealing glances.
Katy Derbyshire (KD): Well, the narrator gives us that in the very first of her notes, when she starts off with this drive through the Alps and is terrified that they’re going to collapse onto her—and I think that continues all the way through. It really endeared me to the book, her scepticism. We, the two of us, between ourselves, we called ourselves ‘mountain sceptics,’ because Zsuzsanna doesn’t just accept this Swiss myth of the mountains’ magnificence. She sees the beauty, very much so, but she also sees the insularism—which she calls racism sometimes—and she sees the expectations and the narrow-mindedness that comes along with the landscape.
MR: And even those criticisms express themselves quite obliquely. In my reading of the voice, she’s a bit of a grumbler. She quibbles. She looks at the mountains, and she thinks about how she could improve them. There are a few moments where she voices her opinion that if a bit of a mountain were hacked off here and there, it would look as picturesque as it’s supposed to be.
KD: Yes, and that’s one of the things that endeared me to the book. It’s just such an amusing idea—like how the architect in the book says: ‘Let’s tidy up these mountains. They’re much too messy.’ I mean, these are all fictional characters, and I think the narrator is also quite highly fictionalised, but it’s very deliberate, introducing this ridiculous notion.
MR: Interesting, I didn’t really catch the fictionalising. The writing convinced me as pieces from a diary, or something similar, and it felt like the artifice, the scrambling, the fictionalising, happened after the fact, in the organisation of the notes. Is that not the case?
KD: I mean, it’s a bit enigmatic, but I think it’s not entirely the case. For example, there are a couple of passages where the narrator’s physically rearranging pieces of paper, and I asked Zsuzsanna if she really did that, to which she said she did not. But she did tell me that a lot of the work is this rearranging, and it’s done on her computer. I suppose maybe that ties in with the fictionalisation, that she’s visualising things for us so that they become more graspable.
MR: I have to wonder about the book in its entirety. Reading it, it feels like there are gestures, but scrambled, towards travel writing, a travelogue. But the numbers are really the only kind of structure. It’s a 1 to 515 that doesn’t really begin or end, geographically speaking.
KD: I mean the book moves, and the mountains change. She takes us through different mountains, starting very firmly in the Alps, then moves to most of the Urals, and takes us with the language. I think she explores her fascinations—such as those low mountains that she refers to, which might be in Hungary.
As you can tell, I know nothing about mountains, which wasn’t a hindrance because Zsuzsanna starts from zero as well. That was one of my concerns when I was asked to translate the book, because the title made me think this is going to require more expertise from me than I have. But no, it’s a book for mountain sceptics.
MR: Oh, you can tell. I think you also see that scepticism in just how many people fall off the mountains or get crushed by rocks, or towns getting avalanched. Is that an extension of her scepticism?
KD: I think so. I noticed myself laughing when you said that, because the book has a slapstick element; it’s not horror, the people falling off the mountains. We don’t see their crushed skeletons. It’s just a kind of a warning to us.
When I finished the first draft, I thought it was a little bit silly that I hadn’t really ever seen any mountains close up, coming from London and living in Berlin—so I did go to the Alps. I didn’t go to one of the mountains mentioned in the book, but I felt like I could see that narrow-mindedness. She talks about geraniums and that kind of twee Swiss architecture, which were very present in the place where I went. It also happened to be just before an election, so I was seeing the election posters, and felt that it was quite clearly a very conservative part of the world. So yeah, it didn’t endear me to the mountains, and I think that it might not endear anybody.
MR: And that’s the point of the book, isn’t it? It’s not just the mountains themselves, it’s everything inside, beneath and at the feet of the mountains, and the people as well. It all comes under suspicion.
KD: I mean to some extent, yes, but what she manages to do is bring it all in. She is interested in—and I want to say seduced by to some extent—the material of the mountains, the stone. And we get these beautiful passages listing the colours that she sees in them. She’s really fascinated by language, and the effect that landscape has on language. I think she’s telling us about the way mountains implicitly divide—such as in the way we speak, so that people on different sides of the mountain will have a different word for ‘brother’.
She does have this fascination with all sorts of different things—definitely the people, but still to some extent the mountains in their effect on people.
MR: The humour must have been a tough thing to translate, because it feels like achieving comedy by just relentless seriousness. How did you approach it?
KD: I think it just has to be deadpan; it’s that kind of Tarantino humour where you’re actually laughing when somebody dies. So a lot of it is the content and the juxtaposition—for example, there’s a passage where the narrator talks about the best way to travel in the mountains. She has examined various methods, but at one point she says that the best is to attach many, many helium balloons to yourself, and calculate how many you need to carry you up. Then in the next paragraph she says: or you could take a helicopter. The humour is in the ridiculous nature of some of her suggestions.
What she doesn’t do—thankfully, for me as a translator—is puns. The comedy is not made of puns or punchlines, but I hope it still comes across.
MR: How does Mountainish compare to the rest of Gahse’s work? Are there any themes or preoccupations here that she explores elsewhere?
KD: She looks largely at Switzerland, or at the places where she lives—which has been Switzerland for a long time. As for Mountainish’s style, it’s similar to her recent work. In her latest book, she’s taken some of the characters from Mountainish and moved them to another town.
I think she’s talked about her work being made up of three aspects: the essayistic, the vivid images—which are really scattered throughout—and then something that she calls narrative islands, these little tiny stories. For example, there’s note 410:
He gradually sawed up the bed, having snuck the electric tool with a sound muffler into the room the day before; the slats quietly fell apart bit by bit in the night. There was no wardrobe in the room, only built-in shelves and clothes rails, which he also sawed up, and he chopped up the table as well. He left the chairs as they were; they were plastic. He carried all the separate parts quietly out of the building down to the riverbank and threw them in. He apologised at reception the next morning for the previous night’s disturbance, but the woman gestured that he had been no trouble. Once he left the hotel, he was never seen again.
A little narrative island.
MR: There’s something else I wanted to ask about—regarding the way the narrator looks at the mountains, which I don’t really know how to put into words. Gahse likes to break stuff down when she looks at things—into concepts almost, colours or categories. It’s something that really stood out to me when I was reading it. It’s kind of analytic, but not quite with any kind of analytic rigor. Is it her fun? Or a tic or a habit?
KD: I think it’s for fun. Throughout the notes, she plays with this idea of keeping folders; she allegedly keeps the notes in separate folders, in which there’ll be a folder for colour, a folder for transport, a folder for hotels, and a folder for people—but where would she put the people she meets in hotels? She plays with this notion.
I think that in the book everything is interconnected in each place—and the connection ranges all over the world because she takes us to other mountains. That, I think, is what leads to this seemingly random structure that she’s telling us about. There is an impetus to think about things in categories—to want everything to be neat—but if you chopped up the book into separate notes and made different piles, it could be ordered in a completely different way. It would be an entirely different book made up of the exact same words.
But Gahse has chosen to keep it messy and anarchic—an ordered chaos—which is one of the things I most enjoyed about this book.
Katy Derbyshire, originally from London, has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She translates contemporary German writers, including Inka Parei, Heike Geissler, Olga Grjasnowa, Annett Gröschner, and Christa Wolf. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar was the winner of the 2018 Straelener Übersetzerpreis (Straelen Prize for Translation), longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017, and shortlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. She occasionally teaches translation and co-hosts a monthly translation lab and the bi-monthly Dead Ladies Show. She helped to establish the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, awarded annually since 2017.
Matthew Redman is the digital editor for Asymptote.
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