It’s Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of the summer. Here in the Hudson Valley, as I type this, the day could not be more beautiful. In my garden, the peonies and irises are blooming, some roses are beginning to open, the hydrangeas have big, green tear-shaped buds. Outside, the orchestra of birdsong is flutey and screechy and melodic, and they tune up and begin singing around 4:00 AM. Nights here are still cool, and today the skies are blue and cloudless, the air soft, fragrant, dreamy. I love all the seasons, but there is something so intoxicating about the late spring when everything blooms and the sun doesn’t set until well into the evening, and the world is fully alive.
Every summer I yearn for an experience of childhood that I never quite manage to reproduce: to be completely lost in a book. Adulthood seems to be about managing multiple complex responsibilities, and juggling the many demands on one’s attention, and this makes that kind of reading so much harder. When I was a child, I remember climbing the television antenna next to our house and sitting under the overhang of the roof where no one would ever think to look for me (not that anyone was looking for me), and there I would read for hours, unseen, uninterrupted, utterly transported.
I am very lucky to have a professional life that requires that I read, but this means reading for pure pleasure happens less often than I’d like. This past year, I decided to try to change that. In the mornings, after making coffee, I take my mug and a book, leave my phone in the kitchen, and in my favorite chair in the living room next to the fireplace, I spend the first hour of my day reading a book. I have found that this regular schedule has made it possible for me to concentrate more, and that concentration has resulted in greater reading pleasure.
One of the books I’m reading is The Story of a Life by the Ukranian/Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky, translated from the Russian by Douglas Smith.
I must admit, I had never heard of Paustovsky until I bought this book, though he is beloved among readers of Russian, and was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize. Paustovsky grew up in Ukraine, and would spend his adulthood in the Soviet Union. The Story of a Life is a novelistic memoir that was published in six volumes (this book contains volumes one through three). While the book describes the turmoil and violence of the 20th century, the book is also incredibly sweet. In one scene, a young Paustovsky has written his first short story, and has taken it to the office of a literary journal in Kiev where he has handed it to the editor. He leaves, and is immediately wracked with self-doubt and self-loathing, believing that the story will of course be rejected, that he will be humiliated, and that his boldness will be rewarded with scorn from the important editor. He goes home to the little house he shares with his grandmother and her boarder, a cellist in a local orchestra, and there he takes to his bed.
A week later, a postcard arrives with the news that the editor will publish the story in its next issue. Of course Paustovsky’s grandmother has read the postcard. She sets about baking a cake, and when Paustovsky returns home, she has put on her good dress, and presents the card to him with tears in her eyes. That evening, they eat cake and drink champagne in the garden to celebrate, while the cellist plays a mazurka. It’s one of the happiest scenes I’ve read in ages, and a beautiful reminder of how one might celebrate an achievement, no matter how modest.
I’m a big fan of the writer and Nobel Laureate Herta Müller, whose novels have mostly described lives lived under circumstances of terrible oppression during the regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauscescu. Müller was born into the ethnic German minority in Romania called the “Donau Schwaben,” who lived mostly in an area called the Banat. She grew up speaking a dialect particular to her village, and her prose is often cited for its poetic intensity. Müller is also a poet, though her method of composition is idiosyncratic, in that she cuts words out of newspapers and periodicals and collages them into poems.
Her most recent book is a collection of these cutout collage poems called Der Beamte sagte, or The Official Said.
It’s not available in English, and this book would be a challenge for a translator, as the poems she has written are very tightly constructed, and make use of a great deal of internal rhyme. The pleasure of reading them comes from these rhymes which make the poems feel a bit off-kilter, even a little demented, and the way the syntax kind of slides into multiple meanings. In the poems, several characters emerge, including Mother, Father, the speaker, and the Official who is a menacing presence in the lives of others.
In this example, you can see how these poems invoke a ransom note, or even a magnetic poetry kit you might have on your refrigerator. I made a quick recording of the poem on the right so you can hear what it sounds like in German.
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