Ungenach was published in 1969, two years after Thomas Bernhard’s second proper novel, Verstörung (Gargoyles), and one year before his third, Das Kalkwerk (The Lime Works). Of the two it more nearly resembles Gargoyles, but it is not very much like either of them. Those familiar with the full range of Bernhard’s prose hitherto available in English may benefit from thinking of it as a cross between Extinction and Amras. Like Extinction, it is anchored in the discourse of a man who has to decide what to do with an estate that he has suddenly and unwillingly inherited; but like Amras, it is composed in significant part of generically heterogeneous fragments.
Having pointed out a pair of salient similarities between Ungenach and two other Bernhard prose texts, I shall devote the balance of these notes to first pointing out the salient differences between Ungenach and the typical Bernhard prose text, and briefly attempting to account for their salience; and second explaining a few of the choices I have made—as well as a few I have yet to make—in translating Ungenach.
The Salient Differences
Ungenach's principal Geistesmensch or monologist, Moro the notary, is a so-called man of the people rather than a member of the vestigial nobility or a super-haut bourgeois. To be sure, he is not a full-blown proletarian (à la, say, the mute Irrsigler in Old Masters), but uniquely among the Bernhardian monologists he is identified by what he does for a living. Any attempt to read a populist thrust into this distinction, however, is at the very least complicated by the fact that something more than half of Moro’s utterances are quotations of the Zoiss brothers’ late “esteemed guardian,” a man of presumably unimpeachable rentier stock. On the other hand, any attempt to recuperate an aristocentric norm by regarding Moro simply as the mouthpiece of the guardian is frustrated by the guardian’s membership, according to Karl Zoiss, in the party of the elder Zoiss’s second wife, Karl’s (presumably) petit-bourgeois “down-dumbing” stepmother.
The United States America Austria
Ungenach's principal posthumous figure—posthumous in that we encounter him only through his documentary Nachlass and the testimony of those who knew him—is notably intellectually inferior to his principal survivor. While Karl Zoiss implies that Robert is inferior to him as a Latinist, he concedes that Robert is a “better mathematician,” attributes his own knowledge of “natural science and English” to Robert, marvels at his general mastery of the art of “talking” and “writing letters,” and his specific achievement of an “amazing description of our family,” in which “his high intelligence was especially in evidence in his characterization of my father.” Karl’s abject intellectual subordination to Robert contrasts starkly to the patent intellectual superiority of Roithamer to the unnamed narrator of Correction and Glenn Gould to Wertheimer and the equally unnamed narrator of The Loser. And lest one should be tempted, in the light of my earlier précis of the book’s attitude to America, to depreciate Robert’s intellection as merely soulless Spockian number-crunching, I must point out that Karl’s quotations of him—e.g., “On the whole, nature is a form of journalism and on many days the brain is a human interest story deleted from the newspaper of nature”—are characteristically every bit as eccentric and exuberantly imaginative in tenor as anything written by Karl in his own voice. Of course, we know this side of Robert only from Karl. But by the same token, apart from Moro’s above-quoted comment on Robert’s emotional inertness, Karl’s appraisal is all we have to go on in our appraisal of Robert; in his own part of the tale Robert is a dispassionately un-self-reflective transcriber of other people’s utterances and cataloguer of their biographemes and idiosyncrasies; he never offers an opinion about anyone or anything, himself included.
Ungenach's secondary posthumous figures, in contrast to its principal ones, come off rather well by comparison with their counterparts elsewhere in Bernhard. The guardian’s sheer fertility of poetic invention, to the extent that Moro accurately channels it, is rivaled only by that of Prince Saurau in Gargoyles. And the elder Zoiss is certainly a much more winning personage than Correction and Extinction’s dead fathers, especially the unspeakably loutish Murau senior, with his obdurate three-ring binder-bound mentality and his conjectural preference for seeing Kant and Voltaire put to death to losing a prize pig. What is not to love about a man who dismisses the figures in a double child portrait painting as “dab brats,” who vituperates the feminine mobility of his neighborhood as “tarted-up sanctimonious country whore[s]”? By all recorded indications, the elder Zoiss seems to have been what we used to call in the patois of my native northwestern Hillsborough County
There seems to be afoot in Ungenach a kind of Shakespearean “double time” that I have not observed elsewhere in Bernhard. We do not know either Zoiss brother’s exact year of birth, but from Karl’s subscribing “1941” to the fragment With Robert in the Hochgebirge, we may gather that the younger of the two, Robert, could not have been born much later than about 1930. Nor, insofar as Robert’s arrival in Chur during his guardian’s funeral in Aurach constitutes a beginning, do we know in what year the tale begins, but as “the foot-march” Karl refers to in his letter to Renner the physicist occurred “in 1937” and “33 years ago,” and as on the Chur-arrival day Karl has been dead for at least a year, we may assume that at the tale’s beginning Robert is at least 40 and that, bizarrely enough for a non-science fiction book published in 1969, the year is no earlier than 1971. And yet Karl says that his mother—the first Frau Zoiss—died “immediately after the end of the war”—in other words probably in 1945 and certainly no later than in 1946, such that any child of her successor would presumably have been born no earlier than 1946 and could have been no older than 35 in 1971. While one need not ponder long to come up with sub-scenarios (e.g., the elder Zoiss’s sexual involvement with his future second wife during his marriage to his first one, or the presence of some shadowy third, Robert-bearing never-wife during the same period) whose interpolation would make the whole chronology internally consistent, Ockham’s razor impels one to suspect that all the assumptions one made during one’s first reading of the first 66 pages of the tale, during which no complicating dates are mentioned—the assumptions that the elder Zoiss’s first wife was Karl’s mother, that Karl’s stepmother is Robert’s mother, that the elder Zoiss met and married her only after the death of Karl’s mother, that both Zoiss brothers are certifiable youths at the time of their father’s death, and that at the tale’s beginning Robert has not yet turned thirty—are assumptions that one is supposed to make. That they prove mutually untenable with the first appearance of a determinate year on the scene is a consequence, I imagine, of Bernhard’s attempt yet again—and for the last time—to capture simultaneously the sense of a living memory of existence “before the catastrophe” of the two World Wars, and a bildungsromanische youth’s-eye view involvement (be it ever so harried or “dysfunctional”) with the present. This was easy enough to do in the early ’60s, when the oldest of the war babies were in their middle twenties. But by the late ’60s it was beginning to be a bit of a stretch. After Ungenach all of Bernhard’s narrators without exception were to be unequivocally non-young “old fools” (see Maurau’s advice to Gambetti in Extinction)—men well into middle age or sometimes (as in the case of Reger in Old Masters) even old age, with the attribute of youth being reserved for the occasional peripheral but pivotal figure such as Anna Härdtl in Concrete or Gambetti in Extinction. (More prosaically, one might argue that Bernhard simply got tired of writing from the point of view of young people once he ceased to be young himself.)
In short, Ungenach is a nut that I have yet to succeed in cracking with the tried-and-tested Bernhardian Nussknacker. The traditional Bernhardian dialectic juxtaposes a pathological, super-superannuated, super-insular, and geopolitically gratuitous but sporadically still-geistvoll Austria against a comparatively healthy but uniformly geistloss larger world, thereby asserting something to the effect of (to put it crudely but not inaccurately),“We Austrians may have more than our fair share of Nazis and sister-fuckers, but at least we—in contrast to you Frogs, Yanks, Limeys, et al.—still have a few people who have something to say even if there is no longer anything to say it about.” Within the confines of this dialectic, such Austria-bound figures as Karl and Moro, along with certain of Robert’s “dispersees”—e.g., the self-segregating Goi with his Styrian shepherd’s wardrobe and Kierkegaard fixation, and the story-telling auto-didact mathematician Schabinger—emit an aura of something not unlike heroism. But without these confines, in a Weltbild within which it is possible for a geistvoll Austrian to flourish outside Austria as Robert Zoiss seems to do, a Weltbild in which “you can take the boy out of Austria, but you can’t take the Austria out of the boy,” the stay-at-homes cannot but be regarded as losers in the fullest, most unsparing, “coldly American” sense of the term; and if such they actually are, why write about them? In the sage words of Dr. Johnson, “natural fatuity is not the proper prey of a satirist.” Ockham’s razor—yes, here it is again, the old OR—mandates that we conclude that Ungenach simply is not as good as Bernhard’s other prose works, and, more speculatively, that this inferiority accounts for its having stayed untranslated into English all those years. But in preference to yielding to this mandate I am inclined to side with the Proust of Contre-Sainte-Beuve, who in praising an author who was even more prolific than Bernhard, wrote “My own opinion of people's intelligence may vary from time to time, but I know quite well that it is my opinion that varies, not their intelligence Nor do I believe it is true that intelligence is a variable force, which at the will of God is sometimes powerful, sometimes feeble. I believe that the mental level to which it rises is always the same, and that it is precisely on that level that it syphons into those vessels which communicate with the past and which, whether it be Un Ménage de Garçon or Le Lys dans le Vallée, are the Works of Balzac." At any rate, I have enough faith in Bernhard to assume that the governing conceptual schema of the novella/tale is cogent, and that any shortcomings in Ungenach are matters of detail, features whose improvement might have made Ungenach into a more engaging read at the level of the intra-ellipsis or paragraph, but not into a substantially better or different text overall. If this schema had been shaky, he would have abandoned the text.
In short, Ungenach is a nut that I have yet to succeed in cracking with the tried-and-tested Bernhardian Nussknacker. The traditional Bernhardian dialectic juxtaposes a pathological, super-superannuated, super-insular, and geopolitically gratuitous but sporadically still-geistvoll Austria against a comparatively healthy but uniformly geistloss larger world, thereby asserting something to the effect of (to put it crudely but not inaccurately),“We Austrians may have more than our fair share of Nazis and sister-fuckers, but at least we—in contrast to you Frogs, Yanks, Limeys, et al.—still have a few people who have something to say even if there is no longer anything to say it about.” Within the confines of this dialectic, such Austria-bound figures as Karl and Moro, along with certain of Robert’s “dispersees”—e.g., the self-segregating Goi with his Styrian shepherd’s wardrobe and Kierkegaard fixation, and the story-telling auto-didact mathematician Schabinger—emit an aura of something not unlike heroism. But without these confines, in a Weltbild within which it is possible for a geistvoll Austrian to flourish outside Austria as Robert Zoiss seems to do, a Weltbild in which “you can take the boy out of Austria, but you can’t take the Austria out of the boy,” the stay-at-homes cannot but be regarded as losers in the fullest, most unsparing, “coldly American” sense of the term; and if such they actually are, why write about them? In the sage words of Dr. Johnson, “natural fatuity is not the proper prey of a satirist.” Ockham’s razor—yes, here it is again, the old OR—mandates that we conclude that Ungenach simply is not as good as Bernhard’s other prose works, and, more speculatively, that this inferiority accounts for its having stayed untranslated into English all those years. But in preference to yielding to this mandate I am inclined to side with the Proust of Contre-Sainte-Beuve, who in praising an author who was even more prolific than Bernhard, wrote “My own opinion of people's intelligence may vary from time to time, but I know quite well that it is my opinion that varies, not their intelligence Nor do I believe it is true that intelligence is a variable force, which at the will of God is sometimes powerful, sometimes feeble. I believe that the mental level to which it rises is always the same, and that it is precisely on that level that it syphons into those vessels which communicate with the past and which, whether it be Un Ménage de Garçon or Le Lys dans le Vallée, are the Works of Balzac." At any rate, I have enough faith in Bernhard to assume that the governing conceptual schema of the novella/tale is cogent, and that any shortcomings in Ungenach are matters of detail, features whose improvement might have made Ungenach into a more engaging read at the level of the intra-ellipsis or paragraph, but not into a substantially better or different text overall. If this schema had been shaky, he would have abandoned the text.
The translation
The at-first-blush comprehension-annihilating profusion of ellipses would actually not constitute much of a nuisance either to the translator or to his readers if it were only offset by the occasional appearance of a judiciously-placed semicolon or dash. For “with very few exceptions” (the inverted commas register my embarrassment at being able to think of only one such exception at the moment—viz., the main clause-less opening sentence of the whole tale—despite my borderline certainty that there are two or more others), these ellipses represent not genuine suspensions of sense (ALTLO, e.g., “Answer the…, please or I’ll…So, how’s it shaking?”) but merely off-trailings of autonomous trains of thought, off-trailings that could be converted en masse to full-stopped off-breakings without doing an iota of violence to the text’s intelligibility at the so-called literal level. Problems of intelligibility thus arise chiefly in passages that would have been equally unintelligible even in an ellipsis-free version, passages in which (IHOP) the author has demanded more of the comma than it can manage on its own, even within the confines of a full-stopped self-contained sentence, e.g., the following one:
for with time,” he said, “you know, come the forces that one must bring to bear and rally, simply in order to bring oneself, to rally oneself, through to the next day, my dear Master Robert, whence one cannot help thinking that this is idealistic nonsense, [one must rally] such colossal forces, of which your late esteemed guardian incessantly spoke, of which they who do not think about them, against whom one must constantly develop, constantly renew and heighten these colossal forces etc., are generally incapable of forming any idea, this colossal energy against the vulgar, unqualified, abject, against human nonsense and against human brutality, do you understand, my dear Zoiss, quite apart from the exertion, the mania for struggle against collegial vulgarity, wretchedness, etc.
which, if I had my druthers, I would be inclined to repunctuate thus:
for with time,” he said, “you know, come the forces that one must bring to bear and rally, simply in order to bring oneself, to rally oneself, through to the next day, my dear Master Robert; whence one cannot help thinking that this is idealistic nonsense; [one must rally] such colossal forces—of which your late esteemed guardian incessantly spoke, of which they who do not think about them (against whom one must constantly develop, constantly renew and heighten these colossal forces etc.) are generally incapable of forming any idea—this colossal energy, against the vulgar, unqualified, abject; against human nonsense and against human brutality—do you understand, my dear Zoiss?—quite apart from the exertion, the mania for struggle against collegial vulgarity, wretchedness, etc.
Moro’s job-title in the original text is “Notar,” which the naïve, fumbling, faux-ami- heedless translator will automatically render as “Notary” without even checking his dictionary beforehand. I, too, have elected to render “Notar” as “Notary,” but not without having beforehand checked my dictionary and a quarter-dozen other sources and concluded that none of the alternatives is either sufficiently pithy or sufficiently unambiguous in its own right to trump the sheer charm of typographical echoism. The only sort of notary I had ever heard of before reading Ungenach was a notary public, which here in the U.S. is anybody—be she (and they are almost always shes) butcher, baker, candlestick-maker, or what have you by trade—who is authorized to seal official documents. The Austrian notary, on the other hand, and according to my sources, is a kind of full-fledged lawyer, a lawyer of a sort that the Brits would term a solicitor, which is to say a lawyer who prepares cases, in contrast to a barrister, who argues them. So why not—on the assumption that most Yank readers of Bernhard know what a solicitor is—call him “Moro the solicitor”? Well, because according to my sources the Austrian notary is a specific kind of solicitor, one specializing in real-estate law. IHOP, DGR, “Moro the real-estate solicitor” is just a bit too Katchoresquely periphrastic a handle for a Bernhard text, and I hope you agree. So I am sticking with “notary.” I cannot deny that in opting to do so I have been at least a smidge inspired by commiseration with those poor creatures who (in Moro’s words) “are embittered and crippled from the outset by their contact with the procedural aspect of the law.” We who have as yet (touchez le bois) been spared all contact with the procedural aspect of the law owe it to ourselves qua sweet and able-bodied citizens to treat the legal-professional distinctions of all countries with a cavalier insouciance—to let the shysters call themselves what they want, and duke out among themselves the matter of the fittingness of these self-bestowed titles.
Moro’s most notable verbal tic is that of consistently referring to Robert’s father and Robert’s guardian as, respectively, “Ihr Herr Vater” and “Ihr Herr Vormund,” literally, “your Mr. Father” and “your Mr. Guardian.” Cassell’s translates “Ihr Herr Vater” simply as “your father,” and thereby implies that I should also translate “Ihr Herr Vormund” simply as “your guardian,” but I am loath to bate a jot of ceremony, let alone a thousand jots of it, for the sake of mere syntactic tidiness; whence my renditions of these two formulas as “your esteemed father” and “your esteemed guardian,” which preserve, via “esteemed,” some of the Herrlichkeit of Herr albeit at the cost of annihilating its obligatory Mister-iousness. But I defer to the judgment of native Germanaphones; if Herr-ing other people’s parents and guardians is indeed as routine as the Sie-ing of strangers and non-intimate acquaintances, I shall be happy to extract all 500 or so of those “esteemed”s as blithely as if they were so many artificial wisdom teeth. A slightly different problem attends the Englishing of Moro’s favorite formula of address to Robert Zoiss, “Herr Robert.” Among English-speakers there are indeed certain settings in which it is idiomatic to address a person as “Mr.” (or “Miss”) followed by his (or her) Christian name: small children call their nannies and daycare-center minders “Mr. Robert,” “Miss Jane” and the like; and in the Jim Crow era black servants sometimes addressed their employers in this style (Consider Driving Miss Daisy and Mr. Randolph and Mr. Mortimer in Trading Places [which, I know, is set in a northern city in the early 1980s, but the perennially whiggish tendency to gerrymander entire latitudinal zones and historical epochs is a can of worms for another fishing-party]). But Moro is of course not a small child, nor is—or more properly, was until the deaths of Zoiss Senior, Karl, and the Guardian—his relationship to Robert Zoiss very much like that of a Jim-Crow era black servant to his employer. It is, rather (albeit possibly only in Moro’s willfully archaizing mind), more like the relationship of a pre-bourgeois era retainer to the son of his patron. And the usual style of address of the subordinate party to the dominant one in such a relationship is—or, rather was—Master or Mistress plus Christian name (cf. Old Willy’s references and addresses to the eponym in my translation of Tieck’s William Lovell). So Moro’s “Herr Robert”s become so many hundreds of “Master Robert”s. To be sure, it would have been nice to preserve the herr-lich trinity of “Herr Vormund,” “Herr Vater,” and “Herr Robert,” but it would have been equally nice to preserve the elephantine-stroke-adamantine Kugeln my aunt would have sported had she been my uncle.
u.s.w./etc./and so forth. As I made my way through Ungenach, at both orifices of the Adamsian fish, I dutifully rendered all the “u.s.w.”s as their official, mandatorily Latinate English equivalent, “etc.” Then, round about page 50, I came across my first source-textual “etc.” (It turned out to be the first ST
Bernhard’s “Abschenkung,” an apparent neologism—it does not appear in any of the (characteristically) quarter-dozens of German dictionaries I have consulted—I have chosen to render as the established English lexeme “dispersal,” a word that admittedly lacks certain of its original’s denotative nuances. “Abschenkung” is a synthesis of the exoteric paleologism “Schenkung,” meaning “gift” or “bequest,” and the equally paleoexoteric prefix “ab,” meaning “away” or “off.” So an Abschenkung is literally a “giving away/off” or “bequeathing away/off.” Now, while both “giving away” and “giving off” are established English idioms, “giving off” will obviously not serve even in a completely tone-deaf translation: we are dealing here after all with an estate, not an odor. At the same time, the notion of “giving away” (or “awaygiving”) does not adequately denote Robert’s treatment of the estate; by default to “give” something “away” is to hand it over en bloc to a single person, whereas Robert is giving Ungenach away in a fashion—namely piecemeal and to many people—that we associate with another gerund-plus-adverb combination, namely auctioning plus our lately rejected friend off. And what do we say of a collection of objects that has been auctioned off to several or more bidders? That it has been dispersed. Voila: “Abschenkung” becomes “dispersal.” As I said, it lacks certain nuances of the original, arguably even more important nuances than those lacked by “awaygiving,” which, despite its not being a real English word, I arguably should have foropted on the grounds that “Abschenkung” is not a real German word either. But up to a point, you have to conform to the etiquette of your target language, and there can be little doubt that English takes less kindly to neologisms, in the strict sense of the term, than does German. To be sure, we Anglophones have no problem accepting even the clunkiest and most pedestrian new expressions by the shedload—witness “glass ceiling,” “blue-sky thinking,” and the like; but just try consolidating one of these multi-lexical critters into a proper, hyphen- or white space-free word ringable in all the usual derivate changes (Blueskythinking < to blueskythink, blueskythinker, blueskythinkerling u.s.w.) and see how long you are suffered to remain in the realm of what Moro terms “the illegal insanity.” To be surer, I have not imposed this ban on neologizing very rigorously. I have, for example, ultimately resigned myself to translating “Spazierganger” as “walk-taker” in preference to my original, non-neologizing choice of “promenader.” Blame it not on your humble translator, but on Moro, for allowing his Spaziergänger to stray as far afield of their native downtown Gmunden as “the Hisamgut…[…] the Kammerhofgärten…Laudach, Langbath, Grünau, Lindach, Rutzenmoos, [and] Aurach,” inasmuch as promenading is an activity that one can idiomatically engage in only in an intensely urban setting; it carries a whiff of ut videre et videri that is simply absurd in the country or the wild. But if Spazierg(ä/a)nger qua vocable had pullulated in the text as profusely as Abschenkung, why then, by golly, I should have gladly sacrificed sense to lexical plausibility and made every single man Jack and woman Jill of those Spaziergänger a promenader in heedless oblivion of whether he was recumbent tramp-hopscotching along the pavements of Calcutta or moonwalking the craters of Charon, the satellite of the former planet Pluto.