Three Paths to the Lake by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mary Fran Gilbert

Wed 27 Jan 2021

Three Paths to the Lake

I don’t usually write like this, mid-book, but here goes. This morning I read “Word for Word,” the first story in the collection Three Paths to the Lake by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mary Fran Gilbert. It was published in a softcover edition by Holmes & Meier with thick white pages which smell great but are now, 32 years after printing, starting to separate from the glue in the binding. The cover is designed to look like one of those blue par avion envelopes, only with the title and author and a topographical drawing inside a rectilinear grid on what would otherwise be a blank blue face (perhaps populated with an handwritten name and address), with red and blue stripes along the edges, stamps in the lower right corner.

I got this book from Tim’s Books in Northampton where Ell and I ended up during a walk. There’s a lot of walking in “Word for Word,” as well as swimming and driving, up the hill over Maratea, where clouds meet the earth and there is a statue of Jesus with arms outstretched. Never having been to Maratea (never having been to Italy at all, except in my imagination), my reading mind populated this scene with walks I used to go on in San Francisco, up through the neighborhoods below Mount Davidson, up its fog-shrouded paths to the summit, where a giant cross stands, in memory of the Armenian Genocide.

Why did I pick it up? Maybe because Bachmann came up while I was catching up with Lauren on the phone the other day. I’ve had Three Paths for a while. I love Ingeborg Bachmann—she’s been huge for me since I was introduced to her through the writing of Hélène Cixous—but, like Lispector (also beloved of Cixous), I don’t always feel equal to her intensity. What do I mean by this? In “The School of the Dead” section of Three Steps On the Ladder of Writing (translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers), Cixous engages with Bachmann’s remarks:

In an interview in which she talks about her books she says everything is war. War doesn’t begin with the first bombs that are dropped, it doesn’t begin with the terror recounted in the newspapers: it begins in the relationships between people. She also insists: “Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, I have tried to say that here, that in this society it’s always war. Not that there is war and peace, there is only war.” It’s harsh but that’s her, in truth, in the Austrian predicament. (19)

This is her truth that remains implicit, seething below the surface of a story of a lovers holiday to the coast and mediated through languages; their superfluity ultimately pointing to their inadequacy.

“Word for Word” begins in BCS with the interjection, “Bože moj!” and ends in Italian, “Auguri!” and I should start by saying that I appreciate Mary Fran Gilbert’s choice to leave the snippets in Italian, French, BCS, etc. untranslated—and I don’t always feel that way! Untranslated Latin and Ancient Greek, for instance, can have a snobbish air in terms of what it communicates something about the intended audience. Here, though, the narrator, Nadja, is an interpreter, and one of the threads of the story (and presumably the reason for the title) is the way that she can move (must move, for a continued raison d’etre as much as for work) between a set of translinguistic equivalences, but that the labour of doing in service to political machination (and its attendant historical revisions) exhausts her and weakens the link between word and meaning:

I don’t know why we have to talk about this stuff, I don’t want to do anything that I have to do every day, before I go to sleep I usually read detective novels, but only to escape from the reality of the daytime which is unreal enough as it is, to me each conference seems to be just another sequel in an infinite indagine—how do you say that?—they’re always searching for the reason for something that happened long ago, for something terrible, and they can’t get through because it so happens that the same path has been trampled by so many, because others have intentionally covered their tracks, because everyone tells only half-truths to protect themselves and then you sift through mountains of inconsistencies and misconceptions, and you find nothing, you’d have to have a revelation to grasp what was going on and, at the drop of a hat, what you should do about it. (25)

Part of why Nadja came away with her lover, Ludwig Frankel, was that he was also from Vienna. An early scene describes them driving towards their destination in Salerno, moving between languages, until:

…gradually she picked up the old singsong again, making lilting melodies of her German sentences and tuning them to his nonchalant German phrasing, how exciting that she was able to talk like this again, after ten years, she was enjoying it more and more, and now to be actually travelling with someone from Vienna! (2)

But with all this (including the unutterable), involuntarily I want to say, comes doubt, skepticism, a perhaps unchangeable core of spiritual homelessness:

She wondered all the same how much they really had to say to one another, given that they had only this city in common and a similar way of talking, the same intonation, perhaps she’d just wanted to believe after that third whiskey on the roof garden at the Hilton that he would give her back something she’d lost, a missing taste, an intonation gone flat, that ghostly feeling of home, though she was no longer at home anywhere. (2)

That my imagination has cast a Red Desert-era Monica Vitti as Nadja is unfair to Bachmann’s character, and a little Romantic—a sort of Criterion Collection Europe for my USian consumption: aestheticized (eroticized?) arthouse suffering. Blame the cigarettes and the Tyrrhenian Sea and the profession of interpreting, which I hold in similar awe to that of translation, and my own feelings of spiritual homeless unadorned by these things!