 So, I have this map, and I'll be pointing to this in more detail in a moment, but I'm going to do this because I have some texts that I'm going to read from, but you don't need to follow along necessarily. So in 1637, René Descartes writes in French, and I don't speak French, so pardon me, when I butcher it, Je pense dans ce, dans je suis, I think, therefore I am, and that's from Discourse on the Method. In 1641, he writes in Latin, ego sum, ego existo, I am, I exist, from Meditations on First Philosophy. In 1644, he writes, again in Latin, the more familiar, ego cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, from Principles of Philosophy. And in the margin next to that paragraph, he clarifies, and I'm just going to skip to the English, not the French, that he says that we cannot doubt our existence while we doubt. And then over 100 years later in 1765, Antoine Leonard Tomas writes in French, again, I'm going to skip past that, and into the Latin because I'm more comfortable speaking the Latin and the French, doobito, ergo cogito, ergo sum, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. And there's a reason why I'm talking about this, and it'll become clear, I believe. Now, I teach a lot of rhetoric at Los Angeles University, and I recognize that sometimes the syllogism is a problematic formulation, but sometimes it offers us a very clean and linear relationship between major and minor premises. And so I was thinking about this idea that not only is it the thinking part of us that makes us human, and helps us to believe that we exist, but also in terms of our intellectual pursuits, it is our ability to doubt or be skeptics that leads us to do more than just be. And that's why I like that final example, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am, and that helps me to think about why I am interested in continuing to translate a poem even though I have discovered certain anti-Semitic strains in the work. And so I'm thinking of offering a revision of that syllogism, which places the thinking thing, the human, into its socio-historical context. And I don't speak Latin, so I'm not gonna pretend that I wrote it in Latin first, but I scour the past, therefore it is, therefore I am. And I was thinking a lot about George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And that's really what I think of when I think of why it's important for me to continue translating a poet who's been translated before. As late as 1966, Pedro Vesruc was translated by Ian Milner, who was an Australian, who's working at Charles University in Prague. But it's a selected work, because it's not the entirety of the Silesian songs which I'm working on. And I think one of the reasons that it is only selected and not complete is partially that he was trying to avoid the more problematic anti-Semitic strains, which is fine for Milner's purpose. But my purpose is to see the whole thing and to inquire about the whole thing. And I wanna read a little bit from the introduction to his selected works from 1966. He writes, in his own country, that Pedro Vesruc is one of the best known and appreciated poets. And at least some of his poems have been translated into almost every language. 50 years ago, the German version, 50 years ago, meaning 1916, the German version of Silesian songs translated by Rudolf Fuchs. Fuchs was an introduction by Franz Werfel, helped towards his recognition as a distinctive figure in modern world poetry. But only a handful of his poems have previously been translated into English. And that's true. There are a handful of small anthologies of modern Czech poetry from the early, maybe the first 20 years or so of the 20th century, where he's anthologized and louded by people no less than, say, Ezra Pound as the true voice of, he calls it Bohemia. I think Vesruc would say it's not Bohemia, it's Silesia. But he had shown up in English periodically. But he was born in Opava, which is a chief town in Silesia in 1867. And that's right around the time of a sort of national revival where artists in the Czech lands began to start composing in Czech, rather than German, which had been the norm for a long while. And so he grew up in the midst of that sort of national revival, leading up to the Czech independence movement in 1918. It's interesting, I think, that he speaks or claims to speak for that sort of rural, mountain dwelling, Silesian native, against Austrian hegemony, against German language in position, against Catholic doctrine. And also against sort of more local, mine, or mineral rights owners. And also against the Jew. So there's this panoply, this myriad of enemies of Silesia that he is speaking against, and I see the anti-Semitic as not the centerpiece of his writing, but as one strain, one thread in overall xenophobia. Which brings me to sort of the culmination of what I'm trying to say here, is that that persecution is not isolated to the distant past in some remote corner in Europe. That xenophobia is present today in this country, and it is important to remember, Minstrel we were talking about this yesterday, how the sort of local normalizing, localized and normalized xenophobia spreads and circulates, it metastasizes it until it becomes Donald Trump leading in the polls, even though he says the things he says about immigrants being rapists and drug drug mules. And so I continue to do the work of translating Beserj because I think it's important to remember how things started in small corners of Europe. This is a map I put together that sort of identifies the various locations of the poems, because that's really his project overall, is to speak as the sort of Beskid Bard, the Beskid Mountain range here, is where he is sort of centering his voice. And if we actually went further down this way, we'd be in the Carpathian ranges, and there's a great book by Yvonne Olbrecht called, in the English translation, Nicola the Outlaw, and it's the same idea. There's this sort of iconic figure who is sort of raised in the mountains, he's the Slav, he's the hero of the Slav, he's kind of a Robin Hood figure, and among his enemies are the Austrians and the Jewish merchants in the area. And so this is not an isolated strain of anti-Semitism, it's actually quite normalized, especially leading up to the middle of the 20th century. And again, I think that those who do not persist in remembering what happened in the past are indeed condemned to repeat it. And as a taste of some of the poetry, I wanted to just share some of the translations that I've worked on. This one is from one poem called Pumlov one, there's two poems about Pumlov. And in this poem, the speaker is referring to Prince Carl Eusebius of Liechtenstein, he's the chief captain of High and Low Silesia from 1639 to 1641, essentially one of the sort of the outside German lords who came in, he built this castle, and this is that this is sort of Bezruc speaking about that process of the sort of the lord from outside coming in and brutalizing the labor force there to build up a monument to his own greatness. The palace is narrow and sinister, monstrously eerie features. For some rich lord it was built long ago by devoted creatures. To get it to climb as high as that went, sang their works inspiration, so much that the foundation seeped their shed blood and perspiration. The owner, who else but Liechtenstein, Moravia's master, end-to-end he rules. German prints to Tony for these parts, he'd not set foot in our schools. He's such a big deal in my homeland, all the works and minds he controls, since he's taken half our nation already, why doesn't he also try our schools? And this is one instance of many where he is trying to encapsulate the frustration of this small region. Silesian is a is a cognate of Czech. For the most part it's identical. There are some linguistic variances, but for the most part it's understandable one way and the other way. And he's trying to preserve that culture in the face of hundreds of years of Austro-Hungarian rule, in the face of hundreds of years of Germanized linguistic traditions, etc, etc. So that's that's my sort of spiel about what I'm doing, what I'm trying to do with this poet. And I wanted to go first, is that okay with this? Fine, okay. I think what I'll do is I'll let those those two do their thing and then maybe if we have time I'll speak to what Carlos I think was going to talk about today regarding the poet Claudio Bertoni. But Ann is going to speak to us about the theme of either overt or implicit pedophilia in the work of, I'm forgetting now, Peter Alderberg. Yeah, all right. I had no idea that we were all in the same corner of the world. Well we would have had a Chilean poet in the next one. So I'm going to speak about some work in progress. It's a book that I'm translating for the publisher Christine Bergen that is as Jacob said, of and about the work of Peter Alderberg. And I'm going to address more questions of what and whether to translate and how editorial choices can shape the presentation of traveling material. So first a bit of background on the writer, Peter Alderberg, which was actually the pseudonym of Richard Englender, was an Austrian writer active around the turn of the century in Vienna. He was widely admired in his day by writers who remained household names in the history of German letters like Arthur Schmitzler, Thomas Mann. But very little of this considerable output has been translated to English or is widely available today. The only book that I know of that's easily commercially available is A Little Volume, put out by Archipelago in 2005 and translated by Peter Woodsman. During this lifetime, Alderberg was part of this thriving coffee house culture in Vienna. What that means in practical terms is that he was sort of the archetypal bohemian bum. He was always hanging around these coffee shops with some of the figures that I mentioned, not just in literary circles but in visual arts. He was constantly short of money, drinking things stronger than coffee, constantly just scribbling things, anything to make a buck. So multiple subtly altered versions of the same thing that he would sell in different magazines. And he was known at the time not just as a writer but also as a collector. So he lived chiefly in a series of hotels, hotel rooms, that he decorated sort of obsessively plastered with images. Anything from picture postcards, really like picture postcards of tourist attractions or landscapes, sheet art prints, and images of women. So photographs of women, drawings of women, many of them quite young. So we'll get to that later. And after his death, the last of his rooms was preserved as a hotel, I'm sorry, preserved as a museum for a number of years, which I think is maybe the most indicative of what kind of a figure he was in his own day. So he was known not just as a writer but also as an oddity, as a sort of eccentric, as a cultural phenomenon. Next, I think the project itself needs a little bit of background. I don't know if people are familiar with Christine Bergen as a publisher, but she, her work is usually done in collaboration with a more traditional press. So in the past couple years, she's done several books that came out of the directions of the beautiful balsam micro scripts that was done with Christine Bergen. So they're not really your normal bookstore literary books. They're on the border of art books. They're always heavily image-based, and in some ways they're not just beautiful design, but images are part of the impetus for the books, the part of the books conception really. The other unusual thing about the way Christine works is that it's a very collaborative process, not just between her and the press, but also between, in this case, her and the translator. She doesn't speak German. A lot of the subjects, Robert Ulzer, Peter Alberg, I just recently did a book with her about Paul Schirbert. They're German language authors, and there's not, you know, it's not unusual that a publisher wouldn't know the source text, but in this case there isn't a source text, right? They're anthologies of what kind. So my role has been just as much research as it has been translation. So I've been sifting through these many texts, making notes on them, making recommendations, and pretty actively helping shape what kind of a book it turns into, which is really fun. In Alberg's case, as in the other cases that Christine has done, the impulse for the book was largely visual, so Christine was really fascinated by images of these runes that he had that were plastered with images, and also by the fact that in Alberg writing and in this we're often linked, sort of obsessively linked, so there's a really fine line between the things that he wrote for publication, which were often very short, you know, paragraph long, fragmentary, even aphoristic kind of texts, but that were intended as formal texts to be published, and the things that he scribbled on everything, so that he scribbled on postcards, on photographs. I think the best example is there was a collection, a published collection of his work that he wanted to give to a woman that he admired, but he just continued writing in it, he continued writing the margins, so not editing the stories that were in the book, but writing entirely new stories, so that there are two books in this one book, and I think, so Christine wanted to present these archival images, that's this whole other, sort of, not published history of Alberg, and to question this line which was formal writing, informal writing, finished and unfinished, and this is sort of his obsessive continuation of the thought process that it didn't end in publication, there wasn't much of a line between published and unpublished. So when I was asked to be part of the project, Christine warned me that it might take a lot of sifting through all of this material to find the good things, and that there, since so much of it was commercial, that there would be a lot of sentimental things, and that there might be some disturbing material. But the goal was to make a book that made a case for Altenberg not just as an eccentric, but also as a writer we're considering, a writer who had something to say to him today, and I think in some ways that's a very easy case to make, so the, the quote on good pieces are strikingly contemporary, they're, they're small, not just in length, but also off the scope, so he takes, as this point of departure, but now objects like a chair or a nail, their story's called the chair or the nail, and he closely observes these objects and invests some of the kind of power and beauty that you might not notice, the writer might not have noticed. I don't know what that sounds like to you, but to me that sounds like the work of Lydia Davis, and in fact, Lydia Davis has translated some Altenberg that will probably appear in this book, so that's what I'm trying to say when I think it's, it is really contemporary, a lot of the work. To Altenberg's attractors, which were many, there were many supporters, many attractors, he was nothing but a bum and a creep, and that's, that's in so much value, I mean he was an alcoholic and he was a womanizer, he was a known seductor of women, many of them quite young, and to be clear, when I talk about his seduction of young women, the actual seduction was teenagers, so not children, I don't think he was actually in active life with pedophile, but in art as in life, so there are countless stories that idealize young women or present fantasies that are pretty important to us today, and in the stories it's not just teenagers, you know, girls as young as eight, the stories aren't graphic, they're not graphically sexual, it's more of this subtle, weird creepy thing that we don't really want to read today. So Christine suggested that this could and should be contextualized, that he was not just, or that rather than be a callous womanizer, he actually somehow had a really deep sympathy and affinity for women, even perhaps alone to have self-defeat a woman, and that even if so much of this is troubling to us today, that actually in a lot of ways he was progressive for his time, which I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of support for that I think he was known for wearing and being a component of loose clothing, flowy things, breaking the bonds of what a man is supposed to look like, he designed women's necklaces, they're really ugly but that's not what you're looking at. So I think that the argument about him having a complicated relationship to women and the feminine holds a lot of weight, it doesn't really get me anywhere in the face of stories like the one I'm about to read up in those. This is just the beginning of a story that will not be appearing in the book, so this is part where I read from the beginning. In the cafe he read this notice from the supplement of November 21st headline, a girl disappears. The young girl shown in the above photograph was Johanna H, the 15-year-old daughter of a railroad official. At midday this past Sunday the girl is said to have been taking herself to piano lessons but never arrived and has been missing since that time. The girly profession has reddish blonde hair, brown eyes, and a delicate figure, her distraught parents, etc, etc. He began to love this young girl with his whole soul. She turned into the hunted doe. He saw her gleaming eyes. Above all she conformed to his ideal. For first of all she had reddish bold hair, he allowed himself to turn reddish blonde into reddish bolder, brown eyes, he looked those alone of course, a delicate figure, and second of all no more was known about her than this. Nothing, nothing but that she had reddish golden hair, brown eyes, and that she was missing, gone, disappeared. And so his fantasy could, I hope so, but he would have sucked to his feet before the disappeared girl, he would have taken off her damn shoes for stockings, he would have carried her shivering to his bed, covered her up to her neck with a duvet, he would have laid a good wood fire, made tea, and kept watch, kept watch, or like a young priest he would have said, Johanna, or he would have, no, he would not have done that. So it's a, it's a rape and seduction fantasy, or abduction fantasy, it's not something that I want to have really anything to do with. So that, that context doesn't really mitigate that, I don't want to, I don't want to translate it, nor was I really moved by a sort of apologia for Altenberg written by the writer Gidec Clyde James, and since there's not actually a lot of published work on Altenberg and image in English, this essay is, I mean that comes up pretty high, and if you will search of Altenberg, and it's, it's an essay and the argument is basically Altenberg wasn't the only one, you know, apparently. A lot of very well-respected figures in the history of literature who loved young women, and we don't mind, like Gerta, Gerta was in love with the 17-year-old girl when he was 80, we still love Gerta. So that's not that convincing to me, and also his other argument was that, you know, Altenberg, which should be praised for being frankly sexual, there was a famous anecdote in one of his young conquests, tearfully says, oh, but Altenberg, you're only interested in the, for sexual reasons, and he says, what's so only? So, I don't know, this is well and good, Altenberg fine, but do I want to translate material like that and be part of giving it a new, like, English? No, I have no interest in that. And even beyond the texts that are really obviously yucky, there are others that present more subtle problems for me. For example, there's a text that's a sort of pee into what Altenberg calls the underappreciated aesthetic genius of women. And I, so I can appreciate that he might have been progressive for his time in arguing that women should be valued as highly as men and that major in society is toxic. As a committed feminist, I still don't have any interest in these essentialist ideas and saying that women are equal, but they're equal because they're pretty and they understand beauty and men can think, so they're equal in different ways. I just don't have any interest in working on that kind of project. But on the other hand, do I want to translate only texts by Altenberg that I find lovely and contemporary and thereby craft a book that presents him as this really progressive, contemporary guy? I also don't want to do that. That seems really dishonest to me. And that I think is, is sort of what the archipelago book does. It's really, really well curated. It's great stories. It's not the full story. So that's the first question. And George Turner has a really good essay on Celine. I don't know if people are familiar with her, but he wrestles with a sick question. But what do we do with artists whose views influence peace, Ireland, anti-Semitism, we find abhorrent? And Steinert has really come to a conclusion with that. But his argument along the way is that Steinert's anti-Semitism is not a horrible aberration. It is intrinsically related to his work. So the same thing that we praise as revolutionary and its crudity and its honesty about the basis of humanity is the same impulse as the anti-Semitism. And so Steinert's instinct is that the book should quote molder in the stacks. Though I don't think all friction holder in the stacks, I think the same principle applies. I think that the impulse that is unapologetically sexual, even predatorially sexual, that idealizes young girls, who use the feminine and places huge value on aesthetic beauty, is the same impulse that collects images to decorate what he calls his nest. And the same impulse that finds beauty in banal objects that identifies with the feminine and with small things, small concerns, I think it's it's all part of the same character. So then the question becomes how troubling is too troubling? I find it difficult to put Altenberg's questionable to say the least sexual preferences and regressive views on women on a par with Sweeney's hate mockery. I think if I started looking too far into the background of anyone I translated that those questions would never end. And I think that there is enough interesting work by Altenberg that it should be brought into English and I think that his character should be represented as honestly as possible, still without including any of the texts that I find really important. So that sounds difficult. But I've been lucky in the project in that both Christine, the editor, and the co-editor, Leo Lonsec, who is a scholar of Altenberg, are pretty much on the same page. And so we've I think we've managed to craft a book that is pretty honest and portrayal of Altenberg by including what we call the good texts alongside images, alongside supplemental material such as letters. So a letter where he talks about this desire to be a woman or his identification with Altenberg. An essay by one of his contemporaries that speaks to you know, Praisie's work but talks about the laughable and the noble parts of his character. And yeah, and of course if I say that there are images in the book the images will include these images of young women that he was so interested in. So I hope that it halves the picture of a deeply flawed person who still had an interesting side as a writer. I hope that it shows Altenberg as he probably was thought of in his own day as a person perhaps to be admired as a writer but not as a person. And so in conclusion I think that when we choose to translate a writer with troubling tendencies, troubling character, troubling writing it's really there's a real duty to contextualize the work especially if it's historic work. Whether that context will shed a flattering or dynamic light or both. And I think there's a real opportunity for that work to be done in editorial choices. I don't personally think that that's the work of the translator to apply troubling things or to alter them in any way. And I hope that editorial choices can sort of bring these questions to light and let the reader enter into a relationship with a writer with their eyes open. It's clean. And you'll be speaking about Metriani's why the child is cooking in the polenta. Austrian writer Heimito von Dulder says, the more you can give an exact idea of what a novel is simply by telling what takes place in it, the less of a work of art it is. And that I think has some relation to what we're talking about here. Anti-semitism. Oh, but we're dealing with a genuine anti-semitism but for an anti-semitism end. Some of them we pedophilia. That's not, it's there but it's not the end of the story. And if someone had told me, Vince, we'd like you to translate this novel and hear the things that happen in it. I would never ever have gone anywhere hearing. But that's not what happened. And what did happen was what engaged me and intrigued me in the same way that I think it engages and intrigues readers. That is, I got an email saying, we had this novel and we would like to have you look at it. And I wrote back and said, I'm afraid I can't. I'm really, really, really swamped. And my editor knew me well. He said, well, I'll just send you the file anyway. And by the time I finished the first page I was booked. So it happened. It proved to me once again that we choose to do the things we're going to do and too busy doesn't play really much of a part in it. But I would not have touched it because the events in and of themselves are pretty awful. There's abandonment, there's sexual exploitation of children from an early age. There was, for example, some years back a very sordid murder, I think in Denver, of a little girl named John Benet, something or another. And she was in beauty pageants and there were these pictures of her and said, it was really repulsive. And her parents spent a great deal of time explaining why that was all right and how it builds girls' characters. And it just creeped me out. And that's the kind of thing that happens in this novel. So as I said, if I had known there's incest, there's rape. And had I heard all of that, I would have said thanks, but no thanks. But I believe what I could do probably to characterize the novel best is to read from it. I'm leaning heavily on the text here. Because I have all this horrible stuff but and the but is the narrative voice. It's really very, very distinctive. And I was saying earlier, it creates the absolute antithesis of those pathos-blading autobiographies where people are a victim like Angela's ashes, well written, but a little much. Or I know why the case where it sings Maya Angelou. And while this novel is not the direct sort of biography, it very, very much reflects the author's life. But she spent a great deal of time developing a narrative voice. And I'll read you the first few pages. She is from, as was the author, a family that escaped from Romania, was granted asylum in Switzerland in the late 60s and is traveling around Europe as circus performers. I'm picturing what heaven is like. It's so big I fall asleep right away to calm down. When I wake up, I know God's smaller than heaven. If he weren't, we'd constantly be falling asleep from fright whenever we pray. Does God speak other languages? Can he understand foreigners too? Or are there angels sitting in little glass booths and translating? And is there really a circus in heaven? Mother says there is. Father laughs. He's had some experiences with God, bad ones. If God were really God, he'd come down and help us out, he says. But why should he come down when we're going to take a trip up there later on to see him anyway? Men don't believe in God as much as women and children do. They don't like competition. My father doesn't want God to be my father too. Here, every country is in a foreign country. The circus is always in a foreign country. But the trailer is home. I open the trailer door a little so as little as possible so that home won't evaporate. My mother's roasted eggplants smell like home everywhere, no matter what country we're in. My mother says we got a lot more out of our own country when we're in a foreign country because all the food from our country is for sale in foreign places as well. If we were at home, would everything smell the way it does in foreign countries? What does God smell like? My mother's cooking smells the same everywhere in the world, but it tastes different in foreign countries because of the melancholy. Besides, we live like rich people here. When we're finished eating, we can throw the soup bones away with a clear conscience, whereas at home, we have to save them for the next pot of soup. My cousin, Annika, has to stand in line in front of the bakery all night long. The people stand so close together that they can sleep while they're waiting. The people here have good teeth because they can buy fresh meat anytime they want. At home, even children have rotten teeth because their bodies suck out all the vitamins. In every new city, the first thing my mother and I do is go to the market and buy a lot of fresh meat and eggs. At the fish stand, I look at the live fish, but my mother almost never buys a fish because it turns my stomach. Only once in a great while will she buy one for herself and use it to make fish soup. When we're eating, I've always read the moment when she'll pick up the fish head with her fingers and suck it. I have to watch every time, even though it makes me sick. Being in foreign countries doesn't change us. We eat with our mouth, no matter what country we're in. We must never go upon to avenge them. I'm used to arranging things wherever I am so that I feel alright. All I have to do is spread my blue scarf over a chair. That's the sea. Next to my bed, I have to see. All I have to do to go swimming is get up out of bed. In my sea, you don't have to be able to swim to go swimming. At night, I cover my sea with my mother's robe, the one with flowers on it, so the sharks can't grab me when I have to pee. I've talked to readers who said they're disconcerted by that narrative voice as I was, and that's what got me to. Some people even said, oh, it's cute, isn't it? But every conflict, every tragedy, every horrible thing has already been set up for us. And one of the most horrible things is simply the lack of rootedness anywhere. What frightens this girl, she's very sad and propitious, and she says this, sadness makes you old. I'm older than the children in foreign countries. Children are born old in Romania because they're already poor in their mother's bellies and have to listen to their parents' problems. It's like heaven living here. I'm not getting any younger though. This is a girl maybe about 11. She, the novel is in four parts, all of which have to do with the one set of a trauma and a collapse of some story. Nothing seems terribly traumatic here, but she tells us the following about her mother. My mother is the woman with steel hair. She hangs by her hair from the big top, and jumps balls, rings, and flaming torches. When I get bigger and thinner, I'll have to hang by my hair too. I have to be very careful when I'm coming my hair. My mother says a woman's hair is the most important thing about her. My father says the hips are the most important. I'm imagining a woman with hips as wide as a surface tends, but that wouldn't help with hanging. One critic has rightly said that the novel begins with the girl afraid for her mother and ends with her afraid of her mother, and we'll trace that as we go. But the title comes from the following. She has a sister. She says he's good looking like a man. She gets into fighting with all the other children. She's a gypsy. I want to be a gypsy too. When my mother is hanging by her hair in the big top, my sister tells me the story of the child who's cooking in the polenta to calm me down. Because when I picture the child cooking in the polenta and how much that must hurt her, I don't always have to be thinking about how my mother might go plunging down from up there, she says. But it's no use. I have to keep on thinking about my mother's death so I won't be surprised. I see her setting her hair on fire with the flaming torch with the plunging to the ground while she's burning, and then when I bend over her face crumbles to ash. I don't scream. I've thrown my mouth away. So we're not terribly far into this novel, which originally might seem almost cute or whimsical, but that voice, when we have obviously a person who is overwhelmed by her anxieties, by her fears, by her restless life, she says at one point as we read, I keep the door closed a lot so the home doesn't evaporate. Parts two, three, and four are structured around traumas and resulting breakdowns. In part two, the narrator and her sister are suddenly taken to some kind of a home or an orphanage with no preparation, no explanation, nothing, and there they are, and of course it's very, very different. My sister and I were suddenly taken to a house in the mountains while packing. My mother hugged and kissed us like a wind-up doll before she put our clothes into the suitcase. She kissed them too. I'll be coming very soon to bring you back. She kept saying over and over. My father didn't want to say goodbye to us. He cursed and punched himself in the face. I'll kill anybody who lays a hand on my daughters. Then he silently turned to our little black and white TV set. He pasted a piece of colored plastic onto it. The face of the talk show host looked like a piece of cassata that's a silly and ice cream cake. We girls and my mother were picked up by Frau Schneider who's been taking care of us and our papers ever since we fled. Is there a doctor in the house? My mother continually has. Are you sure my kids won't be poisoned? We're kidnapped there. Maybe our parents sold us. That happens in Romania. And where was my aunt? So there's sudden, sudden transportation to a home which is filled with a life she's never known anything like, such as going to school, having to learn her lessons, having to go to church, having to cooperate with other children, having set shores. And it is not very compatible to her and her children. And there's a brilliant moment where she intuitively recognizes how her world of free and easy circus life, or apparently free and easy, no school, no rules, she can't read, she can't write. And in fact the actual author was a literate, she could speak fluently Romanian, Spanish and German, but she could not read or write them until she was 17 years old. So we have an illiterate trying to learn to read. And she brilliantly characterizes the essence of the place she is. We want to go back to our parents we said that Frau hits the woman in charge. First you have to finish school and then learn a trade, she says. We've had a trade since we were born, your circus artisans. That's child labor, if the police find out your parents will be arrested. When she talks to us, Frau Hintz puts her nose up in the air as if she were hanging from a meatball. Her face draws up lengthwise, her mouth drops open. I step inside Frau Hintz. She's full of little shelves inside. On them are perched, tiny policemen with little notebooks and little pencils. They're pencil sharpeners by trade. The one who uses up his pencil fastest is allowed to go up to a higher shelf. The one who works hardest becomes the sharpener king and is allowed to toss the shavings down onto everybody else. So she has intuitively almost in the manner of folklore figured out the authoritarianism, the bureaucracy, all that can be characterized by the word Swiss. I mean no offense to anybody. I'm speaking about how she sees it here. She suffers, she is locked in the attic. Her sister is suddenly picked up by the father and again the sister is whisked away and there is the narrator by herself in this home and she suffers an absolute complete breakdown. She is locked in the attic for some very small transgression and I'll show you the page in a second. There's an extra homework assignment as a punishment because I don't want to learn the animal's names anymore. I took a guinea pig to dead and for that Frau Hintz locked me in the attic. In the attic I wrote out my punishment. One, my father died of absence. Two, my mother lives in helplessness. Three, my sister is only my father's daughter. Four, I've grown up little by little and then we have and I don't want any children and I don't want any children and it's repeated and repeated. The girl suffers an absolute breakdown and the last of part two is first I went to the hospital then my mother came and brought me back. Meanwhile we're pursuing the theme of surface life. We're pursuing the theme of endangering our lives and here is what has happened in the home. I don't have lice anymore. Frau Hintz shaved me bald. My sister stood next to us and cried. My sister doesn't usually cry. She's like my mom. You can't cut off her hair she's screamed. Her mother will send the police if she finds out. My sister had lice too. Paulie, Heidi, Traynody, Ruby, Gadney, almost everybody's name begins ends with an I here. I'm glad I don't have hair anymore. I want to stay cold all the time and perform in the circus on the ground only. Maybe our parents gave us a way because I don't want to hang by my hair. Oh, I'd be happy to hang by my hair my sister said. They gave us a way because the circus director didn't want to pay for us to travel, she says. Now that can't be true, my mother says on the phone. The home is so expensive she's only working out to pay those costs so she could have used that money to pay our fares. I'll be bringing you back soon, she said every time. So we've had a breakdown at the end of two. The trauma becomes worse in part three because the mother does sustain an accident and she can't work anymore. And because she doesn't earn money, she begins to get her daughter who's now about 12 or 13 placed in the circuses in Forteville shows. If the circus was sleazy, these Forteville shows and strip shows and reviews are a great view of worse. And it's very clear that the mother is hoping to exploit the girl who dresses up like the Joan of the Ney or has makeup on and dances in Uchi-Kuchi outfits and hobnob with very, very dubious characters at whom the mother keeps throwing her. With the passage about the hair shaved off, the narrator has begun clearly to sense the mother's duplicity. She keeps saying she wants to get her the treachery and she begins to be more afraid of her mother rather than for her and the accident precipitates that. The mother is marked as you probably have gathered by emotional volatility, unreliability, exploitativeness, abandonment, domination and it's worse after the accident because she's panicked about how she's going to help her daughter to make money and there are quick and easy ways to do that. Not beside the point is that the word polenta is taken from Italian but I discovered that in Romanian the word for polenta is mamaliga which is something like mother's home cooking. So the polenta in which the child is cooking is a product of the mother. One critic calls the mother a veritable media and I think that might be going a little bit far but it's clear that the mother has demonstrated a degree of monstrosity and it turns out that the narrator's conflicts are based less on feeling alien in Switzerland or in the home than when being engulfed, prostituted and denied a voice by her mother. The strip shows the procuring she is taken to see a man named Armando with whom a married good Catholic man with a lovely wife and two lovely sons who found moose and the narrator and Armando get intimate. The girl doesn't even really know what's happening in the way she describes the sex act but the mother keeps taking her back. She buys her Mickey Mouse comic book and takes her on the street court to see Armando and leaves. My mother took me along as a rule when she went to see Armando because she was pretending that she was the one visiting him. Or the way she would buy me a Mickey Mouse comic book and some candy. She took me into a room and looked like a doctor was waiting while I would lie down on the sofa and read her sweet. Armando was so happy I was here that they had something important to discuss for a little while. Her eyes gleamed like pickled onions. So while I waited I poked out making Mouse's eyes when every page become cold. We even bypassed the worst of the transgression but any thought that the girl could be reconciled to what's happened, any child be reconciled to that. It becomes more and more terrifying. There's a passage I think I'll touch on. I wanted to read a little bit more of it. As the girl is performing in these shows, as she's being exploited more and more, she has had a dog that she really liked and a boxy and it died. So she has another dog named Bambi. And if I may read to you the passage about Bambi, you'll see the terrible self-hatred, the guilt, the rage, the fear. Everything that happens to an abused child focus in on this and it becomes surrealistic. She has dreams of Bambi as a skeleton chasing her. But I'll read you the passage regarding Bambi. I killed Bambi by mistake. It was an accident. Mary Mistrall, that older girl from the show, called me a murderer. But then she left and said, so what? He was only a dog. Forget about him. Bambi trusted me and I killed him. I've got a rash on my face and neck. It's spreading like fire below my skin. I'm ashamed to perform. Everybody stares and some people in the audience even make signs of laugh. My mother has brought me a guinea pig from the market. Bambi is in heaven now, swimming in the sea of the poor. When we see him again, he'll be made of gold, she says. But I'm not letting Bambi go. I packed him in a plastic bag and put him in the freezer. When the wafer went down to another, I put him in a cooler to keep him frozen. I'm not going to let Bambi go. I didn't kill Bambi. If they take Bambi away from me, I'll scream until the world pulls apart. The child is cooking in the fermented because it has a voiceful of stones. Why did Bambi have to stick his head in the crack of the corridor? You're not allowed to do that. Sticking your head in corridor cracks is prohibited, prohibited, prohibited. If God were God, he'd now have to come down or up and help me bring Bambi back to life. I want Bambi back again. It was an accident. On the Autobahn, Bambi stuck his head out the door just when I slanted shut. Covered in blood, I ran to the rest stop of Bambi and laid him in a cooler. He's dead, somebody said. Calm down. He's dead. He can't be dead. If I can stop the bleeding with ice, he'll be all better again. Part three ends with another breakdown. My rash isn't getting better. Then I suddenly couldn't speak anymore in the middle of the show. Our manager sent us to Madrid to recover. I don't want to be in any publicity photos. Then I was supposed to dance with the other women in the chorus line again. My mother said no. The manager fired us even though my contract hadn't expired because suddenly I couldn't talk in the middle of the show. Part four and last. Can I take five more minutes? Might represent almost the worst of the traumas. Because what happens is that the girl comes into social services, not just the auto-corporate, but systematic social services. Learning to read and write. Learning job skills. And she and her mother are on the way to becoming regular, settled, solid, middle-class Swiss citizens. And she's very, very eager to learn to read and write. She senses that that's going to be her way out in this part of her genetic service life. And while she's getting job training, she and her mother are working in a chocolate factory. But she strongly, strongly resists being put into the middle-class mold. It might be the worst thing that could happen to her. Because she has all these cockamamie aspirations of being a movie star and having a big house and so if you'll a rent comes to visit. But that's an ideal that somehow she will not give up. And the social worker keeps saying, but you have to go to some kind of school. And finally she goes to acting school. I'll tell you about that in a minute. She flunks her audition, but I'll tell you more about that. I think I'd like to read a little bit from my own afterward, if that's all right, about the dangers that are facing her as a middle-class citizen. This aunt she's been talking about and her new husband have joined the middle class with the vengeance, working regular jobs, going to bed and getting up early, settled at a fixed address in an apartment filled with a tacky object like a velvet Elvis. They're former zest for life long. It's a depressing foretaste of what would have happened to veteranine herself. She had followed the advice of her case worker, the well-intentioned frault Schneider, that is Mrs. Taylor who's going to trim everything for her, or Mrs. Cutter if you will. True, her aunt has rescued her and her mother when they were stranded, and the aunt can now afford to be generous in sending clothes and money to Romania, but her life has grown lackluster marked by middle-class pride in earning money and acquiring possessions. Veterine is dimly aware even as a child of what she'll be exposed to if she follows a conventional career path because she has already been evicted from the frault, it's his protestant social authoritarianism. Armando's wife's Catholic sexual hysteria and she had a teacher named Freiland Negui, Freiland Negui's well-meaning but essentially ineffectual du gutterism. So what the narrator decides is she's going to be a movie star and her social worker channels her into acting school and she flunks the audition being told. We're not running in service here. She was supposed to do scenes from Shuler's Mariascoado there was doing. Well, I don't know how a person would do that under her circumstances. And here's where the big divergence comes between the actual veteran and the narrator. The narrator ends with her father used to make home movies and she describes this long poem movie which he makes and I'll read the end of the description to you in a moment. But what happened is that when the actual veteranine flunked her audition she just said, I'm not accepting that. You must let me into your acting school anyway. And they did and she became a very important theatrical figure, producer, playwright, scene painter all around in Zurich for quite a number of years and wrote this novel which does not end with her and I wish I could say in keeping with unpleasant material, we'll see a better one event lived happily ever after and I am one and she asserted herself but you don't live through things like that without paying a price and she did drown herself in 2002. As sensitive to the novel as I needed to become from translating it, it doesn't surprise me because well who could be so impudent to say this is why some people commit suicide and why some people don't. But her trying her sense of self, her achievements were clearly not enough to overcome that and I'd like to hand by reading you the movie with which she ends. Before I saw my father for the last time he made a movie in which God is one of the characters. My mother played God's grandmother and I played his guardian angel. I'm wearing my white lace dress, white paint socks and black packed leather shoes. My fingernails are pink and my cheeks are red. Angels always have red cheeks my father says because they're out in the fresh air a lot. As God my father is wearing his old black tuxedo. My mother tied a scarf around her head like the old women from the country in Romania and put on her flowered morning robe made out of curtain material. At the start of the movie you see my father as a circus director in a red tuxedo. My grandmother lives in the country and in her garden he says there's a tree underneath which it's always raining. Then you see my father as God sitting under the tree. God is sad he's playing a Hungarian song on the violin. My mother is standing at the window and waving. She's made polenta for God. The song on the violin is so sad that the fields, the flowers and the trees in the garden are so sad too. The circus director appears again and says that the garden fence, the window, the door and even the polenta have started to cry. My grandmother shakes her head and says something you can't hear because she's inside the house. Then my dog Boxy runs across the field. He has pink angels wings in his mouth and sits up to beg in front of a bush I step out from behind. I put the wings on and skip over to the rain dream of Boxy. The rain is falling from a watering can. The guardian angel and Boxy dance to God's sad song but it doesn't make God any happier. The circus director appears and says out of love for poor suffering humanity God will eat polenta. He's a foreigner himself you know traveling from country to country. He's sad because he has to start out on a long journey again. The grandmother is crying. Boxy is whimpering and he draws in his tail and puts his ears back. The guardian angel keeps on skipping. Guardian angels are never sad the circus director says they're there to spread happiness. In the next scene God the grandmother and the guardian angel are sitting at a table and eating polenta has a very well meal. At the end the grandmother stands at the door and waves. Thank you. That's fine. So as uh I was listening there I was reminded of why I think I settled on the title for the panel navigating troubling waters because I think we find ourselves trying to navigate between extremes of um letting them letting things molder on the shelf and apologizing for these things and that's that's part of the trick is trying to navigate between those two balances those two extremes of shuttering and putting it away forever and saying well it's okay because there are some redeeming qualities. I think that's that's part of the difficulty I mean I don't know about the two of you but I feel uncomfortable thinking about these these these topics and these texts because they are troubling and um I don't have yeah I don't think I have anything else to sort of say but I kept reminding myself as I heard the two of you speaking that context matters a lot and that maybe that's part of the job of the translator is to also be a scholar of the work and of the figures behind the work not to apologize for but to understand and help explain that sort of troubling material and we did we have nine minutes and if anybody has questions or or similar experiences trying to work through a difficult text for whatever reason or we can all just walk out of shape yes well I I'm currently reading for this publishing house and the last thing I read it kind of differs from from your experience because well this is this is a Mexican novel right and in Mexican culture making fun of people is is pretty big right and then when you're translating to like for the US I mean the US is the most to me one of the most PC countries in the world right so you can't really put everything in context or say oh this individual had this problem when we're actually talking about an entire culture right and then and then I feel like also in this conversation we have to be really careful about thinking of translating up right because we usually think of translating to English well that's like the superior moral framework and and I don't I don't know if I can fully uh are are you are you sensing that that there is a translating up yeah I do feel I do feel that because a lot of times when we're resisting these moral issues or well let me just put this in the context like there was one phrase well in the story right there's a part where this young girl she's 14 and he's trying not to get a boner in front of her right or there's another part where he says I'm I'm a decent guy I don't suspect of the Jews I do this and that right and this is all part of the Mexico City context that that is real and to to everyone living there right so it's not really excusable like saying oh um he had a fascination with woman which was the case right with one you and what I'm saying is sometimes it's like you're putting an entire culture that is not acceptable in the U.S. and you're bringing it into English so how do you have any advice on that on how you approach publishers with this and on why it would be valid to um to pursue a translation of something when we are trying to exactly like look into different cultures I I don't know I don't know how much I can speak to that question of approaching publishers with texts because I'm I'm slowly working through our collection of poems I'm not anywhere near or interested in yet that process but maybe I mean these two are talking about texts that they were approached with right I mean the publishers came to you with these texts in mind I don't know if you have any thoughts that might clarify that how do you pitch a text like that I don't know I translated it all but it has some really it's Russian and it has some really creepy marriages you know much older men in one situation there it's it's kind of unclear but I see a lot of what happens there is out of horrible about Russian culture and history and or self-critical even perhaps wait but there's a lot of history in the book and it's a sort of young saga and so I was approached to do this book but I already read it and enjoyed it it's an enjoyable book in an odd way but I really do see a lot of this stuff this really unpleasant stuff uncomfortable stuff is being related to some larger meaning it's not just a much older man and a younger woman I see it as changes in the country and generational differences it's just so you don't mean allegorical by like metaphor you mean an allegory as in well I see it almost as a historical like a symptom of a country of a different generation and how I interact yeah I think oh sorry even something similar I was thinking about for Mexico like they everyone calls each other gordo all the time like fanny which would be so uncomfortable in an English language now but you can't condemn the whole country for being flippant about its sizest even though we've just become aware of sizeism in our own culture are now able to talk down to translation so it's harder to be curate culture in that way when it comes to slang as opposed to sexual practices or or politics that we can categorically declare as wrong I think if I could flip I was approached and just asked to take a look and I took a look and the voice captured but as I said if somebody had said this is uh exploitation rape incest and I think if I were to try to approach a publisher I'd almost do it from a white heart standpoint and say something like you know how gloomy and depressing they Scandinavian detective novels are and you know how they sell so like give me a chance to tell you about this whatever because if you heard about these uh Tully Janssen and so on now you would think gee gods who would ever read them but people do so I think and it's about context okay uh yes there's gloominess but let me talk to you about other things or about how that fits into a larger picture what you're doing and that kind of translation work and what you're proposing is really important about bringing these into English and sort of being honest about different portrayals of different cultures and different standards and what I'm doing and like a historical translation that's just regressively we don't really need that there's nothing really sensible about it it's not a cultural thing he is just one guy so in that way I would really encourage you I think the more of this kind of stuff we have the better of some things yeah I think that you said something about it being difficult or impossible I don't know which way to use difficult to contextualize a whole culture and I think you're right but I don't see that as a necessary uh it's an obstacle but not a not a dead end there's the the author or even the narrator the voice that's impregnated or misogynistic or something that we're uncomfortable with and then um like in its word it's more the the contents and you know scenes of stuff that we're uncomfortable with yeah I don't know I was hoping to see what people thought about that too you know it's hard because like you said you know if you kind of want to almost like have an apology for why this is okay um but you know somewhere to just pick it up and you know get to page five and be turned off by the book you put it down um so I don't know what this in particular might have an answer to that what you do is like you know you're afraid that's something you pick up the book and you know be turned off by the the narrator the content do you mind if I chime in no okay I was thinking about the it's the that's a that's something I'm worried I don't want people thinking I I'm condoning anti-Semitism um and I think that's why the context and the scholarship is important in some cases maybe not in every case um an introduction and afterwards something like that that accompanies the text itself so that so that the text is not allowed or I mean that's not the right word but allowed to stand on its own as because some people will see that as as condoning what we might find and so yeah I worry about that too still we just had a someone peeking in and it's five exactly on the money but thank you for for sitting through uncomfortable conversations thank you so much