Mati Unt: Brecht At Night

[Eric]

I've just got my translator's copies through the post this afternoon, so it's time to draw the translation to the attention of potential readers, as I imagine it will not be as visible in bookshops in the USA and the UK as many crime novels from northern climes:

Mati Unt - "Brecht at Night"

The novel is a postmodernist one, constructed on the principle of synchronicity. Bertolt Brecht is living in relative comfort in Helsinki in 1940, along with his wife and mistress, after fleeing Nazi Germany and living first in Denmark, now moving on to Finland. His ultimate goal is to travel to the USA by the Trans-Siberian Railway. Meanwhile, a mere 80 kilometres away across the Gulf of Finland, Estonia is being occupied by the Soviet Union. The style is typical for Mati Unt: a large number of short fictional or semi-fictional excerpts, interspersed in this case with poems by Brecht and real Soviet documents pertaining to the occupation. This ties in with the earlier blog articles here about the book of essays about the 1940 and 1949 deportations.

The two excerpts below are something of a contrast and highlight the synchronicity of events.

The first is from the narrative part of the novel. It depicts Brecht's inability to understand the Finnish and Estonian way of life. In it he is speaking to Hella Wuolijoki, the Estonian-born Finnish playwright with whom he cooperated on his Puntila play.

The second excerpt is a small part of one of those documentary inserts, in this case a real article, published by former Estonian KGB agent Vladimir Pool in the Estonian daily Postimees in 1991, and which lists the names and fates of all the members of the Estonian government and the members of parliament. It is written is a sober, factual style, and therefore contrasts starkly with Unt's zany rendering of the way the very bourgeois Brecht perceives Helsinki. This second excerpt describes the fate of the President of Estonia, Konstantin P?ts and that of his son Viktor.

In the published version, Brecht will be called just that. In my manuscript, I stuck to the way that Unt called him BB, which has overtones of "baby". He is indeed rather helpless, and his women have to help him. The italicised parts in the two excerpts are part of the novel. Hella is Hella Wuolijoki, Helene is Brecht's wife, and Grete his mistress.

BRECHT AT NIGHT

by Mati Unt

[First excerpt]

BUT NOW IT?S HELLA?S TURN

The next evening Hella is present again. BB was a little befuddled the previous day. It was, after all, his first day in the mists, the North and the night. BB has talked so much about this that his senses have become dulled.

The world outside has not managed to impinge, and his inner world is in a flurry, has changed into politics, philosophy and goodness knows what else.

"Hella, I have to admit that I?ve still not had a walk round your city," admits BB. "I?ve stayed in my room ."

"Take it easy," says Hella in a motherly way.

BB looks at her and thinks that she has a face, yes, a face like the Moon, but that her body is pretty massive too. For some reason it arouses a measure of unease in BB.

"Please sit down, I mean: sit down would you," he says and sees in his mind?s eye how the iron bedstead of the Hospiz sinks under Hella?s weight. But not all the way. Hella is large, but doesn?t weigh an awful lot. The bedsprings creak, but the piece of furniture is far from collapsing. BB would like now to ask Hella how much she weighs. Below the hundred kilo mark, at any rate.

Naturally, he doesn?t ask.

A long pause ensues. I know, thinks BB, that Grete is where she usually is, but where is Helene? She isn?t in her room. She?s in the communal kitchen making coffee. She has popped out for a moment. As for the weather, it?s like it was yesterday. Otherwise, there?s very little to be seen in the sky round here. The part he can see is colorless, in other words, gray.

The pause continues for so long that Brecht is tempted to term it the general pause.

In theater terms, this means a long pause, an impossibly long pause. With such a pause, a great artist proves to himself, the audience, and the critics how ridiculous it is to keep silent for so long. He has a thousand little ploys up his sleeve, facial expressions or slight gestures, with which he can surprise his audience. He draws it out as long as he possibly can. He senses when the audience is growing bored. There is no need to even start coughing. A maestro knows by telepathy when to cut the silence and return to the author?s text. He starts speaking again. The scene continues as if nothing had happened. This is what Hella is doing right now, someone whose plays, which always have a pause at some point or other, are very popular in Finland.

Hella appears to have laid the golden egg.

"Ich liebte eine Deutsche," she then says, "as a young girl I fell in love with a German".

"Oh yes?" says BB cautiously. He is not prepared to enter into intimate relations with Hella. I can?t do everything here under the sun, thinks BB. And Hella is too rotund for BB. Should be bonier, I suppose.

His wife Helene comes in. Grete may soon come and do some stenography, as canonical BB treatment demands.

Hella, who is quite healthy and normal, can see that the woman sitting there scribbling under the palm is ill.

When Grete was 17 years old, a gypsy woman foretold that she would live to the age of 33. Strangely enough, that is what happened: 1908 + 33 = 1941

Hella doesn?t know that Grete is busy stenographing. She thinks that the consumptive woman is doodling. Many people do when listening to a lecture or are thinking third thoughts in some second place.

"You haven?t asked why I said Ich liebte eine Deutsche says Hella, growing a tad nervous."

"Well, why did you?" says BB with the required enthusiasm.

"Our major author Tammsaare wrote a novel with that title."

"Oh did he?"

"He did."

"I understand," says BB, suppressing a yawn.

In fact, BB doesn?t think anything at first. Fine, this "Tammisaari" wrote some novel or other. So what? I suppose those Finns read everything ever written. Something is being written everywhere. This has been caused by the growth of literacy. Literacy pops up all over the place. They all start writing in the end. Once you?ve mastered the alphabet, you start writing. Why shouldn?t "Tammisaari" start writing if he really wants to? It?d enrich culture in general, or some global model or other.

BB maybe doesn?t know about Whorf and Sapir?s theories, which were expounded at about the same time. What can be said about them (in very simplified form) is this: they thought that language determined thought, maybe even behavior. According to this theory, every nation that has its own language has a correspondingly idiosyncratic way of thinking. And it is pleasant to think that in accordance with this theory the Estonians (like the Hopi Indians) are enriching the kaleidoscope of the world.

If it needs enriching, and if this world is necessary in the first place.

If BB had known these theories, he would no doubt have found fault with them. But he doesn?t know them! So he doesn?t find fault with them. He thinks: well, OK. "Tammisaari" fell in love with a German. Many people have fallen in love. And some have even fallen in love with Germans, thinks BB. So, love in what way?

BB poses this question.

"Tammsaare?s novel is about a neurasthenic... and masochistic person, but what is happening to me is positively romantic."

"Are neurasthenia and a romantic disposition opposites?" he asks, just in case.

"I dunno," says Hella, casually.

"Do tell," requests Helene.

Hella smooths her dress over her belly and begins:

"Anyway, I was a schoolgirl and read so much that I became an?mic."

--------------------------
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[Second excerpt]

WHERE DID THEY ALL VANISH TO?

On 30th July 1940, P?ts, along with his son Viktor (the latter was a member of the Riigikogu and thus belonged to the group of government officials), and his daughter-in-law Helgi were sent to the city of Ufa, Russia, by way of an administrative disciplinary order. The domestic servant Olga T?nder traveled along with them of her own free will. On 26th June 1941, all the P?tses were arrested and were taken to the internal penitentiary of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic which was run by the People?s Commissar for Security and located in the city of Ufa. Konstantin P?ts was incriminated for crimes as set out in Paragraph 58-3, Clause 4 of the Criminal Codex. The President tried on a number of occasions obtain permission to have himself and his family sent abroad. He was also very concerned about the state of health of his grandson, and made the proposal that he himself could be exchanged for Th?lmann or R?kosi, but his proposal was refused. The small boy died.

On 14th September 1942, the President was taken, along with his son Viktor, to Moscow, so that investigations could continue and they could be interrogated by the Special Chamber Commission. After the interrogations had taken place, he was sent for a while to the internal penitentiary in the city of Kirov, and on 24th March 1943, without any decision by the courts, he was put on forced medication, in the closed psychiatric hospital in Kazan (Tatarstan). At a special session of the Special Chamber Commission on 29th April 1952, his case was reviewed and he was again subjected to forced medication. By this time, P?ts had spent 9 years in a closed psychiatric hospital under a special r?gime, and his son Viktor was no longer in the land of the living. He had been arrested at the Ivanovo Prison and death had followed on 4th March 1952 in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow.

The organs of the People?s Commissioner of the Interior had wanted to recruit Viktor P?ts as his assistant and use him in some scheme or other. But Viktor's proud and unwavering nature did not allow him to make compromises, and so he paid for this with his life.

In June 1941, shortly following his arrest and his being sent to the Pensa Prison, Viktor P?ts had been affected so badly by the illegal judgement that he tried to take his own life, by hitting his head repeatedly against the wall of his cell.

[...]

Next in line after the Sverdlovsk oblast regarding these grim statistics comes the Vyatka (Kirov) Oblast. In the city of Kirov itself the following were shot: Hugo-Bernhard Raham?gi and Aleksander Ossipov (as mentioned above), plus members of the Riigikogu Johan Uuemaa (10th April 1942) and Aleksander Saar (1st August 1942). In the Vyatka camps the following government officials died of dystrophy, tuberculosis and other serious diseases, which the prisoners, whose morale had been smashed and were weak on account of hunger, so they could no longer cope with work in the forest : Prime-Minister Kaarel-August Eenpalu (27th January 1942); the Archbishop of the Estonian Roman Catholic Church Eduard Profittlich (22nd February 1942); the General-Chief-of-Staff of the Estonian armed forces, Major-General Juhan T?rvand (12th May 1942); ministers Mihkel Pung (11th October 1941), Karl Terras (25th December 1942), Karl-August Baars (27th February 1942), August J?rimaa (15th June 1942), Aleksander Jaanson (2nd October 1942), Karl Johannes Viirma (11th November 1942), Karl Ibsberg (27th June 1943); members of the Riigikogu Jaan P?dra (4th February 1942), Joakim Puhk (14th September 1942) and Johannes Orasmaa (24th May 1943), plus Hendrik Lauri as mentioned above, who had been sentenced to be shot when already dead.

Translated from Estonian by Eric Dickens

The pedantic listing of dates of death simply adds to the horror of the cold statistics. This excerpt lasts several pages. It is a strange feeling for the translator to copy these names and dates over into what is otherwise a wacky, tongue-in-cheek text. This is one of the better instances of committed postmodernism, as some postmodernist novels distort the boundaries between reality and fiction. Mati Unt, by contrast highlights them, while maintaining the right to humour.

[Liam]

so it's time to draw the translation to the attention of potential readers

Yes, and here's a potential reader who's already grateful. I have read one Mati Unt novel so far and, as you well know, liked it very much.

it will not be as visible in bookshops in the USA and the UK as many crime novels from northern climes

A sad but true prediction.

Yeah, one would think, from the proliferation of crime-novels and police-procedurals, that Scandinavia was the most dangerous place on the planet, infested with serial killers, disturbing psychopaths, legions of plucky everyday murderers (just like you and me), etc. Could it be the 10 hours of darkness in wintertime, do you think?

The pedantic listing of dates of death simply adds to the horror of the cold statistics. This excerpt lasts several pages. It is a strange feeling...

Not sure if I'll be able to handle this (oh, who am I kidding, of course I will): I've already told you about my reaction to The Singing Revolution.

Translated from Estonian by Eric Dickens

I'm sure I have heard that name somewhere before. Could you maybe tell us more about the translator, Eric?

[Eric]

Crying over spilt history
You can't change history, but it's a good thing if sober and sensible people can prevent atrocities and the mismanagement of countries from happening again, if possible.

Learning Estonian and keeping your English
The translator (i.e. me) is an Englishman who started learning Estonian on and off when in his twenties. Decades later, I still don't speak it particularly fluently, but one thing you learn over the years is that this is no handicap to literary translation. What matters, when translating a book, is that you have a good command of English, i.e. the target language. You can't become a literary translator unless you know your own language well, have a wide vocabulary, and don't insist on forcing your idiosyncratic spelling and syntax onto the rest of the world. If you do, the publisher's editor will clobber you.

Blood & thunder
I'd translate a Scandinavian thriller / crime novel / whodunnit if I needed the money. But I would rather translate what I term "real literature", if I can manage financially. Most crime novels seem to be an excuse for creating a cross between a crossword puzzle, where things have to fit into little predetermined boxes, and a morbid fascination with violence, sadism, murder, nastiness, knives and acid baths (handy for dissolving the body after the author has described the minuti? of its being chopped up, dismembered, taken apart, dissected, from page 35 to page 91). I would not translate the Scandinavian equivalent of the work of the Marquis de Sade, but would leave that to a drooling sicko who calls himself a translator (sickos are more often male than female).

Heat and cold in Scandinavia
As for the northern climate, two of the hottest summers of my life were in Lappeenranta, Finland, in the early 1990s and in Tallinn, Estonia, later that decade. The temperature was around 30 degrees Celsius every day for two or three weeks, which can be pretty tiring. By contrast, I remember how, when living in the rather northern Swedish town of Ume?, that in winter the sun would rise at 09:30 in the morning, and was already going down by 14:30 in the afternoon. This is indeed depressing, however many cheery lamps you have in your living room. However, during those few daylight hours, the sun shone brilliantly onto the snow when the temperature was around minus 10 Celsius.

Copyright and permissions
Finally, when translating Unt's Brecht novel, I also translated several poems embedded in the text from the German. This was for copyright reasons. It can sometimes be hard enough to get the copyright sorted out for the main text of a book. To have to then get the permission of the copyright-holder of the original German poems, plus the permission of several previous English translators of what may be six-line poems means a lot of e-mails.

So I retranslated the five or six of Brecht's poems myself, to eliminate batches of frantic e-mails to translators or their estates. The German publishing house Suhrkamp, who held the German copyright for the poems, was really helpful and photocopied the poems for me in their original German versions. This was because the poems had been translated into Estonian in the original version of the novel. I wanted to translate them straight from the German. There is no point in translating via a third language if it isn't necessary.

[Liam]

Eric, I can only hope that my relative unfamiliarity with Brecht's life and work (I've only read Mother Courage) will not preclude my enjoyment of Mati Unt's book.

(I also didn't know much about Henry James, and yet I loved The Master).

[Eric]

As I posted on another thread yesterday:

I note that Brecht at Night has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times:

'Brecht at Night' -- latimes.com

I find it slightly ironic that an English translator who has never been to the USA gets his translations published and reviewed in the States, but they are fairly well ignored in his native Britain.

[nnyhav]

The Best of 2009: Bookseller's Choice - The Barnes & Noble Review (3rd item down)

Almost all the biographical and critical studies of Bertolt Brecht tend to be a dismal business. Especially the biographies: the axes are still too sharp, and most people who get to know Brecht in that homey fireside way end up disliking or even hating him -- and it really gets personal. Not to go in to the biographer’s business (objectivity and such?), but these people can’t seem to help themselves. It comes down to that fact the B.B. was a pretty slippery fellow, unsentimental, realistic, cunning, and always on the lookout for the main chance. In short, not a great subject for biography but a perfect protagonist for fiction, which since the 18th century has overflowed with such scoundrels. Brecht thought of himself as a sort of Confucian dialectician; that came down to accepting the Confucian mode of integrity, speaking the truth to a ruler, but not if it would get you killed. The dialectician knows there are always ten versions of the truth, but “power” decides what is what.

A very fine novel came out a couple of years ago: Brecht’s Mistress, whose author, Jacques-Pierre Amette, is very adroit at loosening the bolts holding up the Brechtian facade, happily revealing more facades beneath.

Now comes Brecht at Night by a supremely talented Estonian writer, essayist, and all-around cultural impresario, Mati Unt. For lack of anything better call it a documentary novel that takes place at the curious point where Brecht was seeking asylum in Finland at the beginning of World War II, on his way to the USA (where he hated the bread and ran into Thomas Mann far too often). The whole point is that he never considered the USSR -- he was no fool. Brecht is at the center, but the great fun of the book is Unt’s digressions on Finland, Estonia, the war, and his own experiences. By this route he ponders the question of whether Brecht was ever really aware of his surroundings beyond his place in them. Unt’s own reflections have a lot to say about living and creating under the thumb of evil and foreign regimes – he has the lay of the land. He underlines the point of all the evasions; Unt was a survivor, and so was Brecht -- perhaps the master of survival. And, strangely, this is what seems to make the "scholar" indignant.

[nnyhav]

First thoughts upon finishing: the introductor goes on and on about ironies, can this guy be serious? and 'tis a shame about the appendectomy (the supporting apparatus isn't readily available internet-wise, Ernst Bloch's essay gated behind jstor so only accessible academically, a shame, since Feuerbach's point of alienation from the self seems relevant at many levels), something to do with copyrights and permissions? but the novel itself plays curious structural tricks, drawing parallels in non-euclidean dimensions which simultaneously con- and diverge, consistent with the dialectical approach investigated therein. I'd said critics had given Things in the Night short shrift; Brecht at Night perhaps longshrifted to compensate; it's certainly not geared to the casual reader, but for the attentive one many courses of food for thought.

[Eric]

I, the translator not the publisher, personally made the decision to cut out several poorly reproduced photos of Brecht and his women, and a couple of essays by Bloch and Masing. I also wrote the introduction. Note also that I chose to translate this book myself; it was not suggested to me by any publisher or literary agent. I was, of course, enormously grateful that Dalkey were interested after the previous Unt novel.

I performed this excision because it had already been a helluva job getting permissions to include all those Brecht poems (though in the end Suhrkamp, still then in Frankfurt, were very helpful). I thus even retranslated several of Brecht's poems, although there were perfectly good translations available, simply not to have to spend yet more time obtaining permissions. You can't imagine what copyright tangles you can get into when a novel is intertextual. The Uku Masing essay was a discussion of the roots of the word "ilma" (weather, air, sky, universe) in Finnish and Estonian, a discussion which was really aimed at people who understood one or other of these languages. If I can find it on the internet, I'll post it here. But I don't think you're missing much that would add to an understanding of the novel.

The principal irony of the book itself hinges on the fact that spoilt bourgeois philanderer and MCP Bertolt Brecht, worshipper of the working classes, was living it up on his way to the United States, as he didn't fancy staying in the Soviet Union. (Quite rightly: Stalin hated Jews.) So although the poor man was living in Helsinki when fleeing Hitler, in circumstances beneath what he was used to, life was a great deal worse in the Baltic countries, invaded as they were by both the Nazis and the Soviets during WWII. The Nazis murdered Baltic Jews and shipped others in for annihilation, whilst the Soviets deported tens of thousands of Balts to Siberia where they were worked to death. That is the kernel of the irony.

In case you still want to bring up the appendices, my introduction covered a great deal which most U.S. and British readers would know nothing about. I did the same with Kross' "Treading Air" for the very same reason. Both authors, i.e. Jaan Kross and Mati Unt, allude to many things which require some knowledge of history, European and Baltic, not ?sthetics.

Also, crucially, there are many italicised places in the text of "Brecht at Night" itself where the narrator steps back and gives historical background and comments from newspapers. Plus non-fiction sections, like the list of books the Soviets weeding out "bourgeois" books of library collections and destroying them.

There are several telling documents from real life between pages 157-175, interspersed (irony, remember) with poems by Brecht (which he dictated to his mistress to type up). There are documents from that era, including the almost comical Russian phrasebook, and the horrifically long list of all the members of the Estonian parliament and ministers who were actually sent to Siberia and later shot. This would be the equivalent of rounding up all the members of Congress and the House of Representatives, and shipping them off to a labour camp in a foreign country to be worked to death or shot. (And putting Obama in a psychiatric hospital, which is what happened to President P?ts.) Guant?namo Bay isn't a patch on the horrors the governments of the three small and militarily helpless Baltic countries suffered during the Soviet occupation.

This is definitely the most political of Unt's novels. He was keener on a mixture of introspection, zany jumps of scene and logic, and other postmodernist things. He started writing pretty avant garde things by Soviet standards during the thaws of the 1960s. But writing about anything social or critical of society in Soviet times was, even that, a balancing act, trying to evade the censor.