*mideuropean*

 CENTRAL-EUROPEAN THEMES - VARIATIONS

(fragment, by Danilo Kis, translation and the joy of following his rhythm all mine)

He is now fifty years old- nothing less than fifty, only more is possible - and he lives in exile (like Kundera), writing in his mother tongue - Chech , Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian ( or Serbian or Croatian), perhaps even in Yiddish (although he seems far too young for that one), as if he were writing in a language long gone.

Thus, the language to him becomes even more precious, he speaks and reads also in French , German, Hungarian, Russian, being since his birth a bilingual, and  having learned two or three more languages later on.

And yet, everyone keeps asking , asking him, in his own mind the sole guardian of his distant and, at the same time, closely intimate mother tongue, asking why  is he unable to write in either French, or German or English, for example.


He , for the umpteenth time, explains how writing is not something done through language alone, but performed using the entire being, using the mythology, the tradition, the conscious and the subconscious, the memory,using everything that a slight of hand turns into automatism, into an accidental metaphor, into an association, into literary allusion, into the idiotism, turning it into intentional or unintentional quotation.

For what truly makes him a central European writer is his dragging along the horrible burden of the melodies lingual and musical, dragging along a piano and a dead horse, together with all that was ever played on that piano, and all of those that the horse carried through battles won and lost.

He drags along the marble statues and bearded bronze busts, the paintings in their baroque frames, the words and the melodies that are incomprehensible to anyone outside of his mother tongue, facts of life that in other languages need to be explained by long footnotes, allusions unbeknown to the great world, wars, epics and epic heroes, unique terms from history and culture, loanwords from Turkish, German, Hungarian and Arabic that carry a clear and precise half step of their own...

...because he cannot grant himself  the choice of not learning and knowing any other language, the choice easily made by a Russian, a Frenchman, an Englishman or a German...


The synonyms, the catchphrases, the proverbs, the riddles, the chants -the synonyms one must choose among, these synonyms are not the same words, neither do they carry the same sound, or the color, because the voiced  Turcism added to the phrase *near dark night*    which in his mother tongue contains distinctive audible original intonation is not the same as *dark night* , for the original construction evokes historical associations, carries the sub context of  ethnography, ethnology, and, to me, a kind of  national darkness, darkness that is heavy, dense and pastose, darkness filled with screams and cries of pain, with the horses' neighs, darkness that carries the crying of the children and the weeping of the mothers mourning them.

It is the darkness black as blood, black as a raven, black as the "two crowblack ravens" from the epic folk poem, in which this new synonym "crow-black" is, if not a new color, then at least a new shade of black, new adjective created to go with new set of nouns and phrases.


The hair of a girl is "crowblack" like that , for instance, and even then, this is not just hair that is black, not just merely black, this is the pitch-black hair or hair as dark as the night, the night that is a different kind of night and can  be "darkly dark" , and it is no longer the same as that bloody  Turkish night, filled with cries of pain and horror, but now it is the night when the moon hides behind the clouds, it is the night when the lilacs scent, the night that is somehow content...and lyrical in its essence.
....




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