A Translation of "Unsterblichkeit ist unmöglich" by Thomas Bernhard

Immortality Is Impossible [1]

A trait shared by all the members of my great family—a family whose roots may be doggedly traced into the darkness of history, this gene pool stocked with all the categories of human possibility and literally (nomen est omen) projected back uninterruptedly from every point of the compass on to the large, hundred square kilometer-sized tract of land south of the Wallersee, a family whose authorial scion I feel myself to be—is contempt.  Those of them who have property contemn those who have no need of property, the sedentary contemn the restless, the rich the poor, the poor the rich, the religious the godless, the country people the city people and the city people the country people and so on.  But as characterological subtypes certain of the country people contemn even certain of the other country people, and certain of the city people certain of the other city people; the farmers contemn the butchers, the butchers the farmers, the brewers the tanners, the tanners the brewers, the innkeepers the truck-drivers, the truck-drivers the innkeepers, the pig-farmers the pig-farmers, the parish priests the parish priests, the schoolteachers the philosophers, the philosophers the schoolteachers, the schoolteachers the schoolteachers, the philosophers the philosophers…each of them contemns each of the others.  In contempt (and most of all in self-contempt) they have cultivated their unmistakable style, their unmistakable regulations.  Their intellect is as of yet (this is how clever they are!) dreaded only by themselves.  What they lack is the stupidity that makes life bearable.  Until they either (as half of them do) voluntarily throw it away, kill it off, or, in virtue of their aptitude for taking disciplined delight in a wretched existence, rush headlong with passionate intelligence into a natural death, they lead what is when all is said and done a more or less glorious but unbearable life.  In conformity with the principle,

Death makes everything unbearable.

the only principle nobody can gainsay, they have annihilated themselves, continue to annihilate themselves.

My family always strikes me as a kind of infinitely capacious cupboard containing all even barely conceivable possibilities of development, each of which in its own way seems almost impossibly absurd by comparison with all the others.  Very early on this cupboard’s inexhaustibility, which stretches into every compass-point of human purposelessness, became for me a state of consciousness hoisting me out of the horizontal vacuity of the common run and into complete freedom.  I always had the option of making myself into anything, whence I eventually became what I am for the time being.  Even today I find it infallibly fascinating vis-à-vis my tribe, and secondarily, the system of nature, to reflect on the astonishing fact that I am as many characters as can be imagined, characters that I must bring to heel by means of ever-more refined varieties of continence (and incontinence).   I could have followed the path of the butcher or the path of the sawmill worker or the path of the parish priest or the path of the common criminal, could have emerged at the best (or last possible) moment out of indecisiveness, out of the fatness of childhood and youth into a normal profession or into a layman’s excuse for one (e.g., real estate speculator), but I became none of these things, unfortunately, rather I am everything all at once, and even the speculation that I am more or less everyone and everything is theoretical.  Thus I devote my time to trying to be everyone and everything and devote my thoughts, thoughts that are ever-more complicated because they are first and foremost productive of tidiness in every cranny of my inner self, to my experience of being a pathetic wretch.   From time to time the network of kinship that has engendered me acknowledges—without in truth (as its tenacity proves) being intrinsically scared to death by this acknowledgment—that it is a corps of Alpine-foothill walk-on artists, a corps that has become routinized and anaesthetized over the course of the centuries, a corps of more or less healthy or sickly physical or mental competencies occupying a center of theatrical activity that has completely ceased to exist.  But it is precisely this no longer-extant center of refractoriness, of stealth, of brutality and of the poetry of possession and dissipation (on a stage that is always the same and yet always changing) that is the cause of the illness that finds no solace in this cause, the illness in which vigilant perfidy and chill-ridden melancholy (in me, as in the others) shamelessly, endlessly alternate.

I walk to and fro, lately in my thoughts and not in reality, into an intellectual mélange of naïve despair and calculable curiosity, whence I emerged thirty-five years ago into the landscape of my tribe (and of its sub-tribes) and I talk myself into believing the whole time I was there I was aware of where the center of my cataclysm was supposed to be, as I seek what I do not find, what I cannot find (The “Nevermore!” of ridiculousness swells to maddening proportions!), my incognito, and I deform myself into my lost youth, my lost childhood for purely academic purposes—and I discover myself.  The fact that (and of the fact that it is a fact there can be no doubt) I am a victim of these objects that I subsequently recognize as my own progeny is quite clear to me.  Thou art the cause, O geographical compartment, thou perverse substructure of existence! I cry and am instantaneously left alone with the echo of my own voice.  Nature is serious and deadly.  The personal catastrophe of every individual may be reconstructed from the mystification of his later years, of his conditions in later life, which are medical conditions, thence passing across the fraudulent vertiginousness of self-accusation, through which is attained a degree of destruction that cannot but elicit not so much our compassion as our revulsion, thence effortlessly into the landscape of childhood and, bereft of especially intimate knowledge of the by-then depleted material, as a form thereof that is spectacular only when seen from without ourselves and merely tentative.  And so I practice etiology vis-à-vis my own person (in rivers and streams, hills and valleys), in doing which I brush against fatality, i.e., conjectures on the theme of the loss of meaning and purpose in general, but in particular on momentary flashes of enlightenment, under whose auspices I understand what I am (and at the same time what I am not), and thus equally momentarily fashion my mother- and fatherland into a precise certainty for myself: I step into houses and bedrooms, into sitting-rooms and into dungeons filled with the battle-wounded, I ruminate on pig roasts, in sacristies.  I search for the origin of my debacle.  I investigate, intervene.  But the homeland naturally manifests itself to him who wishes to convey it as an arrogance, an ignorance, that has grown nauseating.  Irritated by a substance that I do not comprehend, I swap seasons, people, and people’s methods, along with their theatrical backdrops, with stratospherically astonishing dexterity.  I befuddle myself in handiwork and in bodies of thought (which are derivative of handiwork) and in tradition and conscience.  I ruminate in [my] heritage.  I wander about and multiply and divide.  I draw from theirs my own conclusions, I infer from theirs my own potency, impotency, insanity.  Is it the nights slumbered away in the innocence of childhood or the nights saturated with precocious perfidy and megalomania and horror that preoccupy me?  Is it the natural or the supernatural moments of emotion that enchain me?  Does not my discomposure by this childhood not escort me aloft into an emotional eminence that has long since seemed lost (off-limits) to me?  Who was my mother?  Who was my father?  I ask these questions because I do not know the answer to any of them.  How often have I asked them!  I loved only my grandparents, my mother’s parents.  By them my childhood had been launched.  Into improbability, to be sure!  There at that spot (under that tree) and at that moment I discovered more than twenty-five years ago that thinking is the one great folly.  I always loved the hill lands directly behind which are the mountains.  Almost everything must still be explored, for example: a lake that you can jump into and drown in, a stream that you can jump into and drown in, a person who could kill you, a forest in which you inevitably get lost, and so on.  I have, probably I have still not been able to speak [of], discovered a philosopher who discovered me, who defines me: my grandfather.  We play a game that lasts twelve years, until his death, and in which I (because I was the grandson) never lost.  I am introduced to natural science, to the human sciences.  I learn to understand people.  All of a sudden I have a plan: I am going to live several lives at the same time.  Overnight the world is composed of philosophical elements.  There are laws.  Natural laws.  All of a sudden there is the illusion, concepts, nothing but concepts.  One fine day the word “tragedy” is so hollow that I, a six-year-old, suddenly cannot help laughing at it.  It hurts, it doesn’t hurt, in this game of bankruptcy I learn to tightrope-walk on the human level.  I have teachers who affix themselves to mental torpor.  “Who is the teacher?” I ask penetratingly.  I receive no instruction from a Montaigne, a Pascal, a Schopenhauer, names that I often hear.  I draw (accurately) a picture of an oil lamp and am publicly (in my elementary school) applauded.  I see: suspicion is warranted.  But my intelligence is a stumbling block for me, as I now realize.  I am good at geography and at history and love mathematics, which accounts for my predilection for music.  But when I wish to have “the symphonic” explained to me, it is execrated.  I have a friend who lives on the biggest farm I have ever seen and resolve to grow up on this farm (Hipping) because it is a farm in another place.

My grandparents (mother and father are unknown quantities for me) instruct me, my grandfather in philosophical subjects, my grandmother in all the rest, when I am not at the farm.  I grow up with horses, with cows and pigs and with spectral philosophy.  At night I have everything at my command.  I have concluded a friendship agreement with the farmhands (boys and girls), now my relationship with the “universal errors” (Grandfather), with the minds and superminds, is perfect.  I do not read, but I hear how it is.  Impartiality, like suspicion, is an instrument by means of which the cornucopia of “personal nature-capacities” allows itself to be engrossed in the most purposive way.  We, my grandfather, the philosopher, and I, we are in the forest, we are here and there, we bypass the greatest distances in the shortest time, we are masters of detachment, of the lack of detachment, we are, when he is not working, when I am not at the farm, together.  I attend the school of silence.  The school of irony.  The school of independence.  I am interrogated and I interrogate.  Our togetherness is a perpetual court of inquiry.  My childhood is, like his old age, tremendously effortful.  And yet, we tell each other, nothing is regrettable.  Death makes everything possible.  We live in restlessness.  We live in the world of doubt.  We enjoy contemning as we enjoy loving.   We observe the world as though it would be nothing without us.  We have two lives, two actual worlds for our excursions, we have two executive powers, probably: what sad word!  We live through two completely different, completely identical decades, we live through two wars, I live through my war, my grandfather lives through his war.  On my way to school I suddenly hear the middle-of-the-road woman of the house next door [saying]: “I’ll pack your grandfather off to Dachau yet” [cf. “Drei Tage”].  What is Dachau? I ask and I don’t understand the answer.  What is the “fatherland”?  Bombs fall on the town where I go to grammar school.  What is it for me?  What, if not an ordeal?  As I grow up I step out of the hell of boarding school [and] into the hell of the city and out of the hell of the city into the hell of boarding school.  I exist for myself, I continue to exist for myself.  Every night in the dormitory it is as if I am drowning in a turbid, noisome, feculent pool of human urine.  Salzburg: this mental torpor is criminal!  My grandfather’s philosophers, who have become my philosophers, no longer have their say.  The city is becoming an anxiety-ridden psychosis for me.  It is becoming more and more detestable as I grudgingly learn English, French, and then forget [them].  I am forced to play the violin.  Suddenly a squadron of American bombers annihilates all the prerequisites for my studies, for my residence in the detested city.  My hair is burnt away, my violin case is smashed.  I am perturbed, but I live.  At home I work in the fields and stables.  The war swells to an ever-louder, ever-more ruthless din.  But I am in the custody of Montaigne, Pascal, Goethe.  While the world is bleeding to death, my grandfather teaches me how to comprehend active preoccupations, to comprehend by means of active preoccupations.  Over everything hangs a pall of gloom that I do not see.  Political turmoil, what’s that?  Be afraid!  What you don’t sleep through is pain.  Don’t discriminate!  But to be ill of epilepsy indiscriminately is abhorrent in the extreme.  [Your] childhood is immured in the greatest political dilemma in history.  Everything that you hear, that you see, that you inhale, is lethal.  You now behold as corpses many people who used to be dear to you.  You hear of those who were shot dead, you see those who were shot dead, you see those who shot [them].  By reading aloud from Cervantes—no, not from the Brothers Grimm!—your grandfather tries to distract [you] from the prevailing universal death.  You hear that your father has been shot dead.  But of course you have never seen him.  Eventually, the war is over, you are fourteen, you meet your mother, a beautiful woman, as you now notice for the first time.  Today everybody I have mentioned is dead.  But most of the people I haven’t mentioned are also dead.  Practically everybody is dead.  Practically everything is dead.  The very landscape of my childhood is dead.

[1] Editors’ note: First published in Neues Forum, Vienna, Vol. 15, Nos. 169-170, January-February 1968, pp. 95-97.

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur.  Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons.  Herausgegeben von  Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.  Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles.  Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).

  

A Translation of "Politische Morgenandacht" by Thomas Bernhard

Matutinal Meditation on Politics [1]

Meditation: the orientation of one’s thoughts

towards a given subject

Meyers Konverationslexicon [2]

If I now deign to lower myself from the thought that I am thinking, from the rope that I am so expert in climbing, down into the arena of quotidian existence in order to state my opinion of one among several national visions of the Austrian fatherland (my fatherland is world history), if I now delve from the inhumane heights of speculative ideas and ideational speculation into the cartography of my fellow countrymen and countrywomen and into their corporeal and spiritual shiftlessness (in order to tell the truth and nothing but the truth), if I precipitately hurl myself from the heights that, let it be said, you abominate, down into your maws, as though I had suddenly lost all power to resist you, I shall do so in the belief that the following sentences, composed as concisely as decisively as possible, will probably be taken to task for their criminal arrogance, for their treasonous attitude to our country and our people, not to mention their blindness and ridiculousness; some readers them will feel that I am a criminal and belong in a prison (but which prison?), others that I am insane and belong in a mental institution (but which mental institution?).  But such considerations do not perturb me in the least.  To the contrary, they compel me to make the humblest obeisance to the virtue of frankness, in other words to my own self-consciousness.  

I have been asked what I think about (Austrian) culture, obliquely summoned to expatiate on the level it has attained as of this very instant, and basically arrested for the sake of supplying (from my head!) information on that culture, of explaining what sort of influence (Austrian) politics has on (Austrian) culture.  The knowledge, which we may take as a given, that culture has from time immemorial been to all inward and outward appearances the mirror of the politics and politics the mirror of the culture of individual minds, groups of people, and half and whole worlds, licenses me to lean more heavily on the word politics and less heavily on the word culture for the purposes of this explanation that I am now essaying.  For the history of our Austrian politics is, as I know for a fact, more present to [today’s] Austrians[--]in contrast to the Austrians of earlier ages, the Austrians of the monarchy, of the empire[--]than the history of Austrian culture, and the word “politics” has become less of a foreign word than the word “culture” to today’s Austrians—but to the Austrians of today even the word politics, and hence politics in general, and Austrian politics in particular, is not as present in the unique, indulgent, responsible way we that we once took for granted (and whose restoration has since not ceased for an instant to be desirable and needful); from what resplendent heights, heights from which it showered light and warmth upon the entire globe, has it plummeted in the course of a single half-century to its present nullity; an infinitely deplorable casualty, as far as its stratospheric flights are concerned, of a decidedly devastating and annihilating stage in the development of humankind, the global proletarian revolution.  Today, a half-century after the dissolution of the empire, its inheritance is spent, the heirs themselves are bankrupt.  (This state of affairs applies today to all countries and nations in the world that have been reconstituted by the proletarian revolution [as well as to those that have yet to be reconstituted by it].)  Over the wasteland that is the republic, under the most appalling and perfidious intellectual conditions, baseness and stupidity preside in alternation.  In sprouting among us the seed of revolution has proved our ruin, we (grave-robbers that we are) shall go down in history as the genius-less generation.  A spectral symmetry of inferiority and intractability and of intractability growing out of inferiority has become our constitution.  Our nation is a nation without vision, without inspiration, without character.  Intelligence, imagination, are non-existent concepts for it.  In its alpine exclusive feeble-mindedness, it continues at every given moment to prove itself a nation of petty goods-traffickers and dilettantes.  On the miniature mock-up of a territory it has been left with (a mélange of insane asylums and open-air museums for mid-market globetrotters) it works itself up into superlatively horrifying spasms of the mimicry that it has come to regard as an end in itself.  The lowest common denominator is never transcended and the politicians (we are, after all, talking about politicians) and the artists (we are, after all, talking about artists)—science is a unanimous exodus!—are[--]as I, along with everybody else, can observe, my eyes filled with barely conceivable terror[--] the bottom line-driven fabricators of a world conceived with a view to pressing us ever deeper into the slough of disastrousness and ridiculousness.  Meanwhile our downhill march into absolute intellectual (and hence artistic) and hence fundamental (and hence national-governmental) nullity has reached the level of the bond-slave to the most horrifying of all possible visions, driven by nostalgia for his country of origin[;] the trajectory of the perverse emotional hypertrophy of the nation and its social organization now extends into the event horizon of the grotesque.  Wherever one looks, an integral composition of mountains and rivers of the agonized theatrical contemplation of surfaces.  A comatose harmony of fractured dimensions.

At times such as this, one hears on the streets of the capital, which for no clearly discernible reason feels obliged to stage for the world a rousing demonstration of self-abasement, much talk of the fatherland and the government, of democracy and socialism…But the Democrats do not know, or do not wish not to know, what democracy is, and the same goes for Communists vis-à-vis communism and the Socialists vis-à-vis socialism, and so on and so forth…And so the upshot is this: a hundred years ago, a person who said the monarchy was nothing was put in prison and beheaded, today a person is put in prison (or “beheaded”) for saying that Communism is nothing, that socialism is nothing, etc…it’s always the same old story, but I find the same old story with culture preferable (because it is from culture alone that I have derived anything of value at any point in my life) to the same old story without culture, and so on and so forth.  And if I do not adduce any reasons for this preference, reasons that are bound to be completely superfluous to anyone who understands how to think and hence to look and hence to observe (I detest all parties and so forth!), this is because I have neither the desire nor the time to do so…And that the proles (perforce!) have no culture, and that the proletariat has no culture, and that the proles like the proletariat have absolutely no interest in culture, because culture is pretty much incompatible with the concept of the proletariat, and so on and so forth, is an irrefutable fact.  Equally irrefutable is the fact that my existence, and it may be an absolutely abhorrent existence anyway, is of no value to me without the concept of culture, and that when I make use of the concept of culture I am looking to apply the highest, the supremely highest standards, that I have always looked to do so and shall continue to look to do so until the day I die…“The Wicked Monarch and the Poor Prole” has always, in every age, been a fairy tale, and “The Poor Prole” (today proles are ashamed of being proles!) is now an outright lie…In my refusal to repress my devilish irony, I can describe the fact that, for example, “half the administration has defected to the opposition” (just give the sentence a thorough think-through, why don’t you!) as nothing more than a propagandistic glimmer of hope, under whose auspices, because there is no longer any prospect whatsoever of change, everyone is clinging to the god-awful old-timers.  On the foundation of a global political catastrophe, of a global political quandary, a society drawing on every resplendent stripe of imbecile has established itself in Austria, a society that under cover of a thousand-fold supposedly democratic blasphemies about rights and laws adjudicates and proliferates ever more extensively until eventually and conclusively everything with any seemingly just title to the clear and decisive distinction known as fame is utterly annihilated.  The truth is a painful operation to which in certain circumstances the patient’s entire body must be sacrificed.  Austria along with the idea that we have of it must be sacrificed to the truth.  We have derived nothing of value from the annihilation of the monarchy a half-century ago, from the annihilation of Hitler twenty years ago, nothing!  The truth is that with a degree of precision that in hindsight could not but chill us to the bone (if, that is, we were to surrender for but a single moment to the truth as our sole possible rational recourse) the republicans have made Austria into a laughingstock in the eyes of the world and destroyed it, and that for the past two decades we have been being led by, for example, a perversely impotent Nazistic two-party dictatorship that in parliament, in the so-called highest legislative body of the republic, has been all the while washing its mountains of dirty laundry, into an ever deeper abyss.   This is all owing to the fact that the republican ideal in general (one must not lose sight of what a weak-limbed thing it is!), and communism and socialism in particular, are and always have been vague and completely unrealistic concepts, poetic pipe-dreams of solitary uncomprehending noncomprehenders, of nineteenth-century high voltage-brained schizophrenics haplessly smitten with the world and its highly cultivated structure, people who attempted through a series of catastrophic nation-wracking short circuits to electrify the entire world and ultimately did electrify it and incinerate it…and so on.  

Much as I abhor making a long story out of a short one, I cannot refrain from affirming that we in Austria no longer have anything to hope for from the “concept of Austria.”  We will come undone in a Europe that may come into existence someday, in another century, and we will be nothing.  We won’t turn into nothing overnight, but one fine day we will be nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  And we are practically nothing already.  A cartographic nullity, a political nullity.  A nullity in culture and art.  Just open your eyes and you will see that this absolute darkness as yet amounts to but a few microseconds of the full span of history.  How, at this moment, as I behold in its entirety the despair that permeates our nation in doubtlessly permanently impassable labyrinthine permutations, am I to summarize the logic of traditions, my own hair-raising, comprehensive knowledge of the whole subject?:  Austria on the world stage, acting out its own tragedy (in the Shakespearean sense), a tragedy that in full view of the audience has lost its mind and its very consciousness!  By all rights, our existence ought to be an example of pure horror, but in fact it is merely pathetic.        

[1] Editors’ note: First printed in Wort in der Zeit, Vienna, Vol . 1, pp. 11-13; a volume dedicated to the theme The Mis-Politicization of Our Culture.

[2] Andacht on its own can indeed mean “meditation,” but the  word I have translated as “mutitanal meditation” is Morgenandacht, meaning “matins”—i.e., morning prayers or devotions.  The definition of Andacht given by Bernhard corresponds verbatim to the one in the 1893 edition of Meyers, which continues “especially towards God and divine matters, with the aim of elevating oneself above finitude, baseness, [and] selfishness.”  In isolating “Andacht” and truncating its definition, Bernhard seems to be saying both that devotions may be paid to things other than God and that politics is in a certain sense a sacred subject. 

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur.  Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons.  Herausgegeben von  Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.  Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles.  Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).

A Translation of "Junge Köpfe. Thomas Bernhard" by Thomas Bernhard

Young Minds [1]

Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was born on February 10, 1931 in Heerlen, Holland.  He is a citizen of Salzburg.  Time and again he revisits the landscape of his forbears, the Flachgau region.  He regards the time he spent in Vienna as wasted, inasmuch as while residing in that remarkable architectural achievement he was forced to associate with its inhabitants.  He views the Viennese not as loveable but rather as inebriated by their own inability to criticize themselves.  The pertinence of this observation extends to the town’s young and tenaciously senescent literati, dyed-in-the wool epigones who rot like living corpses in the coffeehouses.  Incapable of composing either a hymn or a thought, they lionize each other in the second-class seating section and in the column-inches of the world’s most smut-ridden, witless, and undistinguished newspapers.  The only female German-speaking poet of distinction he knows of is Christine Lavant.  He has yet to hear of a world-class living German male poet.  The absence of even a single decent critic in Austria infuriates him.  He finds Dodorer tedious, and the rest as insufferably smug as they are worthless.  He has resigned himself to living in the most beautiful country he knows of surrounded by producers of art and literature who are sixty to a hundred years behind the times.  He writes to avoid dying of boredom and frustration.  He keeps rereading the same authors—Péguy, Hamsun, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, and Saint-John Perse, from all of whom—as from Góngora and Yeats—he has learned a great deal.

He toils away at his own work with energy, with tenacity, and with indifference to his enemies.  He has so far published four books that seem to him to be a good starting-point for his plans.  In early 1960 Samuel Fischer will be publishing the first volume of his Memoranda, which he plans to continue as a series of chapbooks.  The Mystery of Holy Week will be brought out at the same time by Otto Müller.  In the autumn of 1960 he will publish Twenty-eight Poems.

[1] Editors’ note: first published in Morgen.  Monatsschrift Freier Akademiker [Monthly Journal of Free Academicians], Vol. 15, October 1959, p. 5; the text is unsigned.  The Bernhard-authored books advertised in the portrait never appeared. 

A month later, on 7 November 1959, the following response to “Young Minds” appeared in Morgen:

“A letter from the Café Hawelka

Vienna, November 1959

To the editors of the Morgen, the Monthly Journal of Free Academicians:

It is seldom good form to address open letters to the editors of newspapers or journals.  But on this occasion, silence would be tantamount to criminal inertia.  In the first number of your fifteenth volume, you seem to be going out of your way to break with tradition.  Hitherto under the rubric of “Young Minds” you have presented in fair copy the career histories of several young personalities, and made possible some often-interesting encounters on our end.  But whether the latest acquaintance you have chosen to introduce to us is exactly a “nice person” is debatable to say the least.  Doubtless out of loyalty to Thomas Bernhard, you have indited sentences for which in our view the editors cannot have been responsible.

At the very outset we get a real “shiner”: “He regards the time he spent in Vienna as wasted, inasmuch as while residing in that remarkable architectural achievement he was forced to associate with its inhabitants.”  How memorably a certain significant leading light of the recent past—a figure who had yet to receive any accolades in these parts—dispensed maxims of a similar sort; he, too, felt more at home (because unrivalled) in a vapid provincial district [=“in einem ‘flachen’ Gau,” punning on the name of the “Flachgau region” that Bernhard says he “revisits” (DR)] than in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Vienna’s cafés.  Further on, the sentence: “Incapable of composing either a hymn (what does Bernhard mean by hymns?) or a thought, they lionize each other in the second-class seating section (?) and in the column-inches of the world’s most smut-ridden, witless, and undistinguished newspapers (does he think of even the Neue Freie Presse as one of these?).”

The extent to which Christine Lavant, whom we all deeply cherish, is actually well served by Bernhard’s clichéd plaudit remains to be seen.  As to the identity of this single world-class German male poet who is nowhere to be found—we suggest to Bernhard that he should look no farther than himself.   My, but how near to seek is greatness!

If we had read [no] further, you would still have been spared this letter, but what comes next is to put it mildly sheer chutzpa, as we say in our ever-so “rot-ridden” coffeehouses: “He finds Dodorer tedious, and the rest as insufferably smug as they are worthless.”  But who is this “rest” supposed to be: Felix Braun, A. P. Günersloh, George Saiko, Alexander Lerner-Holenia, or Herbert Eisenricht?

In early 1960 Otto Müller is expected to publish a poem called The Mystery of Holy Week.  What is this author of a prima-facie Christian poem thinking? How will we manage to take the Christianity of his poem seriously now that he has beaten the drum of invidiousness so insistently in your journal?

In the spirit of democratic freedom, we request your publication of this letter, so that the opinions expressed in it may be publicly known.

With sincerest regards,

Jeannie Ebner

H.C. Artmann

Gerald Bisinger

Elfriede Gerstl

Kurt Klinger

Thomas Bernhard was identified as the author of this portrait by Wieland Schmied (then editor of Morgen): on 22 July 1992 he sent Siegfried Unseld some texts by the “young” Bernhard and wrote in an accompanying letter, “[…] last but not least, from the Morgen a self-portrait of the poet—and the response from the Café Hawelka.”

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur.  Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons.  Herausgegeben von  Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.  Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles.  Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).

A Translation of "Dichter über Georg Trakl" by Thomas Bernhard

Poets on Georg Trakl [1]

This month marks what would have been the seventieth birthday of the poet Georg Trakl.  The Akademiker has posed to a number of young poets the following question: “What does Georg Trakl mean to me?”  The answers are as follows:

For world literature Trakl will never have the significance of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé; he does not even merit comparison to a man like Lorca (1889-1936); but in Austria he has contributed something lasting to modern poetry in his capacity as a singular lyricist of distinction, probably because he, like few others, had a talent for despising and being despised—most penetratingly by the householders and muleteers of his native city of Salzburg, which has not changed a jot since his time.

Trakl’s influence on my work was devastating; if I had never heard of him I would have come a lot farther by now.

[1] Editors’ note: First published in Der Akademiker.  Zeitschrift des österreichischen Akademikerbundes, Vienna, February 1957.

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur.  Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons.  Herausgegeben von  Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.  Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles.  Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).

A Translation of "Ein Wort an junge Schriftsteller" by Thomas Bernhard

A Word to Young Writers

What you young writers need is nothing but life itself, nothing but earthly beauty and squalor; in other words the tenant-field of my father and the incredible stamina of my mother, the struggle of your soul, into which you must be driven by your own hunger and your own squalor, the thirst for glory, which tormented Verlaine and Rimbaud at the “Elysian Fields.”  What you must have is not health insurance policies and stipends, prizes and grants; it is the homelessness of your soul and the homelessness of your flesh, the daily inconsolability, the daily forlornness, the daily frost, the daily reverses, a single crust of daily bread that once upon a time brought forth such majestic and pathetic creatures as Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, and Whitman, cities, landscapes, in other words memoryscapes erected as fortifications against the dust, the tidings of a tortured irremediable mode of existence that eats away at itself from one hour to the next for the benefit of the creation of new, powerful poems.  What you need is every place where a man drops dead as soon as he stands up, where rocks are bathed by rain and where the sun swells to agonizingly huge dimensions.

But where are you, who so complacently allow yourselves to be mollycoddled as our nation’s laureates, who walk across the throbbing asphalt in the characters of your future collected works?  Where are you?  What drives you forward along with your age, which is here only once for you, only once for all of us, and that is melting in your mouth before you have even tasted it?

I picture you not as denizens of the violent, strife-ridden life, but rather as clean, embittered official wardens of index card files, as henchmen, well-rewarded specialists at the nature conservation authority or at some rural or municipal cultural bureau.  You cower in the coffeehouse, tearlessly and humorlessly, loathing yourself and your surroundings, miles away from life, from the forests, from the mountains, from your community, miles away from all poetry…You have prostituted your character and an overpowering fear of necessity, fear of your own thoughts, fear of your wickedness, fear of fields and the floors of barns, of clamping irons and shovels, fear of the truth, of your own inferiority, of your own greatness.  You capitulate unconditionally to small-mindedness, to the title “Doctor,” to the Party, to the municipal authorities today, to the arts section of your backwoods local news rag tomorrow; your toadying is indescribably abject; you bow and scrape to every good-for-nothing who happens to be “influential.”   And you have so handily contrived things that this age of lyrical corporations and prose-trusts is also the age of insurance companies and bottom line-oriented production.  But what kind of work can one expect from bottom-line oriented poets?  From you bottom line-oriented lyricists, who have started up a joint stock company with the newspapers P. and L., and who have worked out with our manufacturing concerns an agreement guaranteeing you a monopoly of all the prizes awarded by our academies?

The books you write are insufferably tedious, they are made of pure bumfodder, your diction is phoniness exemplified (you have long since lost the ability to speak your native dialect), you spurn the diction of Hölderlin, of Whitman, of Brecht; your books are fit only to garnish All Saints’ Day wreaths, and your verses reek of the cheap wood schoolroom writing desks are made of.  It is as if you had never experienced a single real event, as if your entire life had been built out of some books bequeathed to you by an elderly cousin, as if you’d been gorging yourselves at breakfast, lunch, and dinner on nothing but that lifelong consumptive Rilke and his pallid kinsmen, as if your grandfathers had not been brewers, meat-smokers, grain-merchants, soldiers, market-drovers, gypsies—and true poets.

Your prose has neither spring nor summer, neither autumn nor winter, it is neither black nor red [2]; it dribbles into one’s stomach like unsalted gruel.  But because you do not live like brewers, meat-smokers, market-drovers, and gypsies, because you are perpetually stricken with dread of father time’s walking-stick and of your own despair, you have nothing left to say.

The age in which you prided yourselves on your own hunger, the age in which young writers took stands against presidents of whole countries, the age in which you fomented revolutions, is long past!  Long past is the age when Hamsun roamed the streets of New York as a vagrant, when Sillenpää could not collect his Nobel Prize because he, who lived in a real sense, who had indeed seven children, nevertheless had not a single penny for train-fare in his suitcase.  And long past is the age when you sang out your lute-accompanied verses from on high.  Out of a nation of poets there has been forged a nation of the well-insured, a nation of civil servants and party-members, a country of weaklings, a passionless landscape of shareholders.  Out of a nation of visionaries there has been forged a nation of procurers!

Needless to say, nobody is any longer perishing in some remote corner of the globe!  Nobody any longer goes to rack and ruin for the greater glory of poetry.  But nobody is any longer in touch with the grass and the rivers either!  And if you keep regularly and phlegmatically paying your insurance premiums right on through to the age of sixty, and bowing and scraping to the buffoons and housewives of the lyrical and philosophical broadsheets, you will never become a Lorca or a Gottfried Benn or a Charles Péguy, let alone a Whitman.  The grant schillings you live in expectation of spell your inevitable annihilation. 

          

[1] Editors’ note.  First appeared in Berichte und Informationen, published by the Austrian Research Institute for Economics and Politics in 1957. 

The publishers prefaced the text with the following remarks:

“Here a young writer addresses other young writers.  He speaks the language of youth with all its incantatory rhetoric.  But can an ardent spirit of the younger generation at all help feeling provoked by zealous favor-seeking and pressure-driven bottom-line oriented production in lieu of unbridled gusto in living?  We ourselves would once have been grateful for an opportunity to express such views.”

   

[2] i.e., neither right-wing nor left-wing (DR).

THE END

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur.  Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons.  Herausgegeben von  Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.  Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles.  Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).