Translation as Transhumance. Mireille Gansel

in this room that suddenly seemed so vast. Everything that the grim tide deposits on the shores of a life. A bit like picking up and reassembling the fragments of a clay vase shattered by history, swallowed up by the Holocaust. Perhaps an attempt to alleviate the absence, so many absences; to hear voices again, their voices.

      Whatever the reason, that summer evening I quietly closed the door and paid a visit to the Bodleian Library. Perhaps because every archive in that timeless place is a memorial. At the entrance to the reading room, you hand over your pens and pencils—you are not allowed to make notes in the margins here. A place to read: lesen—which also means to gather or glean. In monastic silence, beneath the vaulted Gothic ceiling, I opened the somber chronology and turned one by one the darkest pages of the Nazi atrocities in Slovakia.

      Mitzi, with her large eyes the color of night, lively and yet melancholy. A batik artist, she had wanted to enroll at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, but she was barred: because of her Czech passport? Or because she was Jewish? In London, she earned her keep making soft toys and lived in that one room, even after her mother’s death, until the end of her life. In the little courtyard, she had planted a tiny fir tree that she had once brought back from the Wienerwald she so loved. But she knew there was no place for her in that Austria where, on each of her rare trips, she felt the unspeakable, intangible, tightening grip of anti-Semitism. She spoke in German, for her a highbrow language, as if those centers of intellectual life as she called them—Brno, in Moravia, and Prague—where “cultured” Jews gathered, were still in existence. She said that word, kultiviert, with pride, even reverence. For her, it still had the special aura it had acquired during the time of Franz Joseph’s empire and had kept intact since the age of Enlightenment, protected from the political instrumentalization of Kultur in Bismarck’s Germany. One word, the embodiment of dignity for generations of Central European Jews. And in the hierarchy of those intellectual values, Mitzi, entirely lost in her recollections, mixed up tenses and times, abruptly switching to the present as she tried to bring into focus the inner images that haunted her, drawing on that cross-border lexical crucible: “Prag ist ein kolossales geistiges Zentrum—auch Brünn” (“Prague is a huge intellectual center, as is Brno”). She added a sentence whose syntactic architecture was both rigorous and baroque, like the German spoken on the Viennese banks of the Danube: “Auch geistig hochstehende intellektuelle Leute sind nach Wien oder an Budapest gefahren” (“Intellectual academic highbrows, too, went to Vienna or to Budapest”). How do you translate the ascending movement of that spiral of adjectives extolling the spiritual and intellectual superiority of those who left for Vienna and Budapest? An ornately crafted German derived directly from the language of Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, and Martin Buber, in which she relished telling me in an immutable present tense about the villages of Moravia and the area around Bratislava where members of her vast family had settled. This relative is a sheep farmer on land he was able to acquire when the Jews were emancipated under the Empress Maria Theresa; that one works in an aristocrat’s plum brandy distillery; another farms a plot of land rented from a Christian count; several are craftsmen. In the hugely rich and versatile palette of that German, where so many languages intersected, she reveled in finding the subtlest nuances and colors to evoke the Gypsy villages, the sheep in the twilight haze, the beauty of the cornfields, and in the evenings, after sunset, the tray in the kitchen, with milk for the rabbi who came by to give his blessing. A whole world, now lost, with not one trace of a single survivor.

      In the semidarkness, Mitzi reminisced quietly. She spoke almost in a whisper. In that language of memory, language of the mind, language without a home. Language in exile.

       SALVAGED LANGUAGE

      Aunt Renée’s eyes look as if they have been hewn from the crystal blue of twilight. This silver-haired elderly lady is one of Grandfather Nathan’s nieces. Her voice sounds surprisingly familiar. I close my eyes and I hear Szerenke—the same register, the same intonations. On the table in the little kitchen, the Sabbath candles are lit. The French window is open onto the rose garden that Uncle Eduard lovingly tends in this religious section of one of the oldest kibbutzim in Israel. Recently arrived from Czechoslovakia, during the final days of the Prague Spring, he is putting down new roots by tending his flower beds. Bending over the earth, he weeds, prunes, waters, and contemplates, in infinite silence and with infinite patience. That same silence that echoed around their daughter’s table, where I first met them, at her apartment outside Tel Aviv. A gulf of silence between them and their grandson Judah, who is celebrating his twentieth birthday surrounded by his army friends. A gulf of silence, for want of a common language. Not Czech, nor Hungarian, nor German, nor Yiddish. Vectors of an entire world, culture, history, memory. So many internal wellsprings now forgotten, buried beneath the thick layer of the noncommunicated, the noncommunicable.

      Sabbath evening in the little blue kitchen, the fine white hand-embroidered tablecloth appears even whiter in the flickering candlelight. Aunt Renée and Uncle Eduard pray in Hebrew and chant the psalms with a gentle, grave joy. Then, in the quiet of the evening, in soft, low, solemn voices, they bring back to life a world that has been swallowed up. So many murdered loved ones, whom they alone remember and commemorate.

      Taking turns, sometimes speaking at the same time, they tell their stories as if drinking long drafts from the fount of their lives, as if the starry night will never end. They speak in a German accented with all its neighboring languages: Hungarian, Czech, Yiddish. Language of the soul, language without a home. Salvaged language.

       A TREE PLANTED BY THE POET

      When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was given a school travel grant. We wandered through the ruins of Dresden. I didn’t know then that it was the Allies who had deliberately reduced an area of light and beauty to ashes. An area without borders, belonging to an entire people, to all peoples. I didn’t yet know that there are silences that are also ways of rewriting history. I saw an old woman begging beside the Elbe. I began to speak to her, but the teacher accompanying us came over to stop me. Those gagged words haunted me for a long time; I felt a sense of betrayal. The words of the other, words reaching out to the other. Failing to take the step, to cross the border. I have never forgotten that broken figure in her black shawl, a German woman in mourning.

      In Weimar, Goethe’s house on the vast Frauenplan. The first time I had been inside a poet’s home. I walked around it with reverence, as if it were a sanctuary of the mind. I was looking for slivers of life, of presence, in that huge mansion that had remained intact amid so many ruins. An absence that was peopled by poems. The voice of the poems I had just discovered and which spoke to me as though they were written in a private language. On that trip, I was also taken to Buchenwald. I did not know then that two or three years earlier, there had still been deportees there, prisoners of the Soviet police. In the camp’s deserted avenues, we were told about the struggle of the anti-fascists. One of the things I remember from that day is a huge, black death slab made of concrete or cement. A screed of silence. I didn’t know yet what I would later discover—that words and silences can be used to create languages known as doublespeak. And one day too I would find out that at Buchenwald there was “somewhere within the area of our camp, so they say, marked with a commemorative plaque and protected from us prisoners by a fence, a now nobly spreading tree, planted with his own hand,”¹ by the poet Goethe. Imre Kertész wrote those words with the eyes and words of his fourteen-year-old self, a Jewish child deported to Buchenwald.

      Many years later, in a Berlin café, he told me that although he wrote in Hungarian, he still thought in the German of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That supranational, cross-border language in which he had grown up. An impregnable territory which no barbed-wire fence, no watchtower, would ever be able to restrict or enclose, over which no barbarism would ever be able to cast its shadow.