Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

I think often of Gombrowicz in Berlin. Of his refusal to see Poland again. Distrust toward the Communist regime still in power there? I don't think so: Polish Communism was already falling apart, cultivated people were almost all involved in the opposition, and they would have turned Gombrowicz's visit into a triumph. The real reasons for the refusal could only have been existential. And incommunicable. Incommunicable because too intimate. Incommunicable, also, because too wounding for the others. Some things we can only leave unsaid.

Stravinsky's Home

Stravinsky's life divides into three parts of roughly equal length: Russia: twenty-seven years; France and French Switzerland: twenty-nine years; America: thirty-two years.

The farewell to Russia was accomplished in several stages: Stravinsky is initially in France (starting in 1910) as if for a long study trip. These years are incidentally the most Russian in his creative work:

Petrushka, Zvezdoliki (based on a work of the Russian poet Balmont), Le Sacre du printemps, Pribaoutki, the beginning of Les Noces. Then conies the war, and contacts with Russia become difficult; still, he remains a Russian composer with Renard and Histoire du sol-dat, inspired by the folk poetry of his homeland; only after the Revolution does he realize that his birthplace is lost to him, probably forever: the real emigration begins.

Emigration: a forced stay abroad for a person who considers his birthplace his only country. But the emigration stretches on and a new loyalty develops, this one to the adopted land; that's when the break occurs. Little by little, Stravinsky abandons Russian themes. He goes on in 1922 to write Mavra (a comic opera based on Pushkin); then, in 1928, Le Baiser de la fee, that recollection of Tchaikovsky; and thereafter, aside from some few marginal exceptions, he never returns to them. When he dies, in 1971, his wife, Vera, complying with his wishes, rejects the Soviet governments proposal to bury him in Russia and has him taken to the Venice cemetery.

Without a doubt, Stravinsky, like all the others, bore within him the wound of his emigration; without a doubt, his artistic evolution would have taken a different path if he had been able to stay where he was born. In fact, the start of his journey through the history of music coincides roughly with the moment when his native country ceases to exist for him; having understood that no country could replace it, he finds his only homeland in music; this is not just a nice lyrical conceit of mine, I think it in an absolutely concrete way: his only homeland, his only home, was music, all of music by all musicians, the very history of music; there he decided to establish himself, to take root, to live; there he ultimately found his only compatriots, his only intimates, his only neighbors, from Perotin to Webern; it is with them that he began a long conversation, which ended only with his death.

He did all he could to feel at home there: he lingered in each room of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every piece of the furniture; he went from the music of ancient folklore to Pergolesi, who gave him Pulcinella (1919), to the other Baroque masters, without whom his Apollon Musagete (1928) would be unimaginable, to Tchaikovsky, whose melodies he transcribes in Le Baiser de la fee (1928), to Bach, the godfather of his Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924) and Violin Concerto (1931) and whose Chorale Variations on 'Vom Himmel hoch' he arranges (1956), to the jazz he celebrates in Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918), in Piano-Rag Music (1919), in Preludium for Jazz Ensemble (1937), and in Ebony Concerto (1945), to Perotin and other old polyphonists, who inspire his Symphony of Psalms (1930) and especially his admirable Mass (1948), to Monteverdi, whom he studies in 1957, to Gesualdo, whose madrigals he transcribes in 1959, to Hugo Wolf, whose two songs he arranges (1968), and to the twelve-tone system, about which he initially was reserved but in which, eventually, after Schoenbergs death (1951), he recognized yet another room in his home.

His detractors, the defenders of music conceived as expression of feelings, who grew irate at his unbearably discreet 'affective activity' and accused him of 'poverty of heart,' didn't have heart enough

themselves to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music.

But that's no surprise: no one is more insensitive than sentimental folk. Remember: 'Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling.'

PART FOUR. A Sentence

In 'The Castrating Shadow of Saint Carta,' I quoted one of those Kafka sentences that seem to concentrate all the originality of his novelistic poetry: the sentence in the third chapter of The Castle where Kafka describes the coition of K. and Frieda. To show precisely the specific beauty of Kafka's art, instead of using the existing French translations I decided to improvise my own most faithful possible translation. The differences between a Kafka sentence and its reflections in the mirror of translations have now brought me to the following remarks:

Translations

Let's review the translations. The first is by Alexandre Vialatte, from 1938:

'Hours passed there, hours of mingled breaths, of

Literal English versions of the three published French translations of Kafka's sentence are given here with the aim of enabling monolingual readers to understand the authors argument. These are followed by the German original with an exact English translation. For Vialatte, David, and Lortholarys translations, as well as the author's own translation into French, see the end of this part (pp. 119-120). (Translator.)

heartbeats in common, hours in which K. never ceased to experience the sensation that he was getting lost, that he had thrust in so far that no being before him had gone such a long way; abroad, in a country where even the air had none of the elements of his native air, where one must suffocate from exile and where all one could do, amid insane enticements, was to continue walking, continue getting lost.'

It was recognized that Vialatte was a little too free with Kafka's text; that is why the publisher, Gallimard, decided to correct his translations for the 1976 publication of Kafka's novels in the Pleiade series. But Vialattes heirs opposed this; and so an unprecedented solution was arrived at: Kafka s novels were published in Vialattes faulty version, while the editor, Claude David, published his own corrections of the translation at the back of the book in the form of an amazing number of notes, such that, in order to reconstruct in his mind a 'good' translation, the reader must constantly turn the pages to look at the notes. The combination of Vialattes translation with the corrections in the back of the book actually constitutes a second French translation, which for simplicity's sake I'll simply refer to as 'David':

'Hours passed there, hours of mingled breaths, of merged heartbeats, hours in which K. never ceased to experience the sensation that he was going astray, that he was thrusting farther than anyone ever had before him; he was in a foreign country, where even the very air no longer had anything in common with the air of his native country; the foreignness of this country choked him, and yet, among its mad enticements, one could only walk still farther, go still more astray.'

Bernard Lortholary deserves great credit for having been radically dissatisfied with the existing translations and for retranslating Kafka's novels. His translation of The Castle dates from 1984:

'There hours passed, hours of mingled breathing, of hearts beating together, hours in which K. had the