Seas Otherwise Too Treacherous To Navigate: Mario Aquilina on the European Essay and Its Planetary Histories

December 4, 2023 | in Interviews | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt . . . to derive ideas or abstractions from experience . . .

In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.

In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022).

In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien.

Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011).

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory.

Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

September 18, 2017 | in Essays | by Vincent Kling

Vocabulary and pronunciation, and even spelling, mark larger histories of settlement and local adjustment

We return with another installment of Translator’s Diary where Vincent Kling, winner of the 2013 Schlegel-Tieck Prize, takes us through the nuances of translation. Today he discusses the intricacies of vocabulary and pronunciation and how history and geography combine to fashion complex, unique identities.

Hoagie? Hero? Sub? Some weeks ago I was staying in the Rhineland, near the Dutch border, where I developed a pesky summer cold. When I told a close friend who lives in the area that I was “verkühlt,” he grinned and said my Austrian side was showing, since a German would say “erkältet.” This reply reminded me of those popular posts on social media that ask if you drink “soda” or “pop,” if your sandwich is a “hoagie” or a “sub” or a “hero,” if you call those luminous insects “lightning bugs” or “fireflies,” if you drive around a “rotary,” a “roundabout,” or a “traffic circle.” Then there are the arguments about pronunciation; do you wade in the “crick” (like brick) or the “creek” (like meek)? Vocabulary and pronunciation, and even spelling, mark larger histories of settlement and local adjustment, which might explain why amature language lovers also enjoy reading about Samuel Johnson’s vs. Noah Webster’s lexicography, or about the perceived level of crudity or finesse in this or that regional expression (quick disdain for Southern “y’all” or “might could”).

Translators from German likewise need to be aware of geographical and cultural forces; I confine myself here to differences between standard German in Germany (Bundesdeutsch) and Austrian German. (Swiss German is fascinating but outside our framework.) I know from experience through making my own mistakes (some of them in print!) what bloopers can arise from ignorance or inattentiveness. Of course, one approach to this topic would be to list variances in grammar and syntax, vocabulary (especially food), idioms, and the like; I’d rather recommend Robert Sedlaczek’s fine book Das österreichische Deutsch to readers of German and move on to a more comprehensive insight, one that traces a truly characterizing difference.

L’Académie allemande. German novelist Martin Mosebach reviews pertinent history about the German language in an essay about Doderer warning readers not to overlook vital cultural differences. Regrets are occasionally expressed, he remarks, that there was never an institution in the German-speaking world comparable to the norm-setting, regulating Académie française. But in fact there was, he claims: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible regularized and unified German. Aside from its religious import, the Luther Bible is one of the essential documents in the history of the language, reconciling divergent regional usages, harmonizing dialects, fixing idioms, introducing needed abstract neologisms, and creating a normative language balanced between literary derivation and colloquialism and accessible to all German speakers. What we know as modern “High German” derives very largely from this one book; as Mosebach says, “German [meaning “High German”] is a Protestant dialect,” and “The Reformation was the German Academy.”

Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

May 22, 2017 | in Essays, Translator's Diary | by Vincent Kling

Understanding narrative structures in their historical context has a direct impact on a translator’s word choice, tone, and register of diction.

We’re starting the week with the fifth installment of the Translator’s Diary, a column by Vincent Kling, winner of the 2013 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. As Kling translates the 909-page Die Strudlhofstiege by Heimito von Doderer for New York Review Books, he is allowing us to peek into the ebb and flow of his thought process. Here is Kling’s dispatch from the prestigious Omi International Arts Center. (Intrigued? Don’t miss the first, second, third and fourth installments.)

Abstraction Meets Craft: My dateline this month is Ghent, New York, where I am writing from the idyllic Ledig House at the Omi International Arts Center. Ten translators, five from English to German and five from German to English, are presenting work in progress during a week of close reading and feedback. I’m grateful for the practical comments about the part of Strudlhofstiege I presented, especially suggestions for bringing out more fully the playfully interwoven levels of the narrator’s voice. That’s crucial, because he’s not only the main event, he’s the only event, the sole governing sensibility, digressing and freely associating as eccentrically as the narrator of Tristram Shandy. He loves the drollery and irony of shifting registers, creating variety by deft incongruities in elevating or lowering the diction. An example: two characters challenge a third character’s plan, because they know from experience it will miscarry. The passage I brought to the workshop said that they were “stubbornly resistant,” but the native German speakers found my rendering one level too high. I had mistakenly retained the narrator’s formality from the beginning of the sentence to the end, even after he had adroitly switched gears. We entertained “they nixed the plan” or “they put the kibosh on the plan”—both now a level too low, we agreed—until I settled on “they balked” or “they dug in their heels.” General endorsement; on to the next refinement.

Meanwhile, my efforts in earlier posts to trace the ancestry of that narrating voice as an aid to grasping its full scope and range—thank you, readers, for not logging off—made me afraid I was straying too far from the practicality of craft. However, the group showed me how a seemingly abstract concern, which I feared might be taking me away from the text, was in fact leading me back to it, since understanding narrative structures in their historical context has a direct impact on a translator’s word choice, tone, and register of diction.

“Learned Wit,” Scholastic Universality, Baroque Elaboration: One participant ratified my search by encouraging me to read Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s German novel The Island of Second Sight (published 1953, translated into English by Donald O. White in 2010). It’s a wonderful discovery in itself and eye-opening in its kinship with Doderer. Thelen subtitles his book a volume of “applied recollections,” a term applicable in moderation to Strudlhofstiege as well, since the narrator is likewise the sole presence and presents a mammoth set of memories that lie decades in the past. Vigoleis, Thelen’s alter ego, similarly glories in asides, digressions, parentheses, addresses to the reader, convoluted backtracking and remote tangents, filigree, pyrotechnics, set-piece lyric rhapsodies, and meta fiction, proclaiming his joy at leading us on wild goose chases and detours around the mulberry bush. These narrators even digress to explain why they’re digressing! Same associative approach, then, but Thelen hews closer to linearity than his Doderer “cousin,” who reconfigures the narrative line into curlicues and zigzags of the kind Sterne draws in Tristram Shandy. Thelen develops from the base line of a story in straight chronological order; Doderer skillfully blends and blurs two time periods, 1908–1910 and 1923–1925. In both cases, the distance in time between the incidents themselves and their accounts creates reflective irony as the basic mode of observation.