Camouflaged Peacocks,
37 Degrees Celcius,
and Other Literary Matters
Interview
By Krzysztof Jarzebinski
Fall 2004.
www.foreigner.de
Photos: Krzysztof Jarzebinski
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Krzysztof Jarzebinski: You grew up
in a very international family, didn’t you?
Aris Fioretos: It wasn’t worse than others.
My father is Greek, my mother Austrian; I was born and raised in
Sweden. Discounting one bigamist, a faked Ariernachweis
and the outcome of one or two extramarital liaisons, that’s
the extent of our genealogical corruption.
Jarzebinski: What’s home for you?
Fioretos: “Home” is one of those bewildering notions
that offers no difficulties only as long as you don’t scrutinize
it too closely. Your query seems to suggest that it ought to be
thought of in the singular. I can’t say that corresponds to
my experience.
I’ve never been forced
to leave a country or a culture against my own will, as so many
exiles have. “Home,” then, for me, isn’t fraught
with social or political tension. Nonetheless, I suppose I belong
to the category of people who have no (notion of) “home”
— at least not in the sense of one single and defined one.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel at home. I spend
most of my time here in Berlin, with my wife and child. What else
should I call my present living situation but “home”?
Still, we tend to while away the summer in Greece, and during the
year, we spend at least a month in Sweden. Added to that are several
sojourns abroad, especially in the United States, where I’ve
spent many years in the course of the past two decades, studying
and then teaching. This geographical instability, shall we say,
is really only a nuisance in terms of airfare.
Jarzebinski: Which language did you speak with your parents?
Fioretos: Since my parents didn’t have much Swedish at the
time I was born, my first language was German. It continued to be
the family language for my first, oh, four years or so. I didn’t
look particularly like a Swedish kid, however, and I didn’t
have a name like “Ingmar” or “Benny” or
“Bergman” or “Andersson.” Pretty soon, I
developed a sense of being different. There wasn’t much I
could do to alter this, assuming I felt the need to do so, but at
the age of four, I realized I could change the language I spoke.
That’s when I requested we speak only Swedish at home. My
demand came with all the trappings of a boy in the obstinate age.
Somehow I must have felt a need to reconcile my family with the
environment surrounding us, or at least to smoothen the transition
from inner to outer circle. From then on, the language of our new
“home” country became my language. It’s still
the language in which, today, I write mostly. I’ve published
a few books in English, and the odd text in German as well. But
for better or worse, Swedish has become the tongue I don’t
seem able to avoid when I open my mouth.
Jarzebinski: It’s your mother language . . .
Fioretos: Strictly speaking, German would be my “mother tongue,”
just as Greece would be my “fatherland.” Whatever you
wish to term Swedish in my case, it soon became the language I embraced
— partly, I suspect, out of a need to assimilate, partly because
neither of my parents were native Swedes. In other words: the language
was uncontaminated by previous experiences. In yet other words:
I’ve always felt Swedish to be more my language than my parents’.
Still, the fact that we spoke this foreign tongue had comical consequences.
For example, my father would often give lectures, and I was usually
asked to correct them — becoming the lingual authority in
the family at the not too versatile age of ten. You may imagine
what his papers sounded like once I’d gone over them with
my red felt pen. I’m sure I was able to correct the odd glaring
error, but I prefer not to think about my remaining alterations.
Jarzebinski: When did you become interested in literature? Can you
remember a point when you decided to become a writer?
Fioretos: There was never much of a conscious decision. Already
as a child, I experienced this absurd need to express myself. I
would get absolutely mad if I wasn’t being understood (and
just as mad if I was being understood only too well). Obviously,
such frenzy doesn’t need to translate into a taste for literature.
There is expressiveness in music, too, in the visual arts and so
forth, and I doubt it mattered much to the ten- or twelve-year old
I once was which form of artistic articulation I would have chosen.
But I had this violent, almost abstract urge to express myself —
no matter what, no matter how. I suspect the flip-side of this need,
or rather greed, might have been the fear, and feeling, of not being
heard, of not having a voice, of not leaving a trace.
I grew up in a family where culture mattered. The great passion
of my father, who was a professor of medicine before he retired
a few years ago, was not and is not anatomy but literature. Being
the oldest child, I felt a certain obligation to follow in his footsteps.
But once I had identified his true love, it wasn’t difficult
for me to abandon the idea of becoming a doctor. There was never
much drama involved in my decision. Perhaps it didn’t even
amount to a decision, but simply was feeling easing into fact. I
don’t trust psychological explanations much. Still, it’s
probably safe to say that complications would have arisen had the
language of my parents been Swedish. Since that was my turf, however,
or at the very least the turf with which I was most familiar, sometimes
to the detriment of my parents, unclaimed territory spread out.
In a manner of speaking, Swedish became my promised land.
Long before you transform into a writer, however, you’re a
reader. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read.
It began at the age of four or five, and for a long while, I read
only children’s books and stories. Then, slowly, came crime
stories and detective fiction, after that the usual adolescent fare:
Hesse, Dagerman, Salinger — and Kafka, at which point there
was no turning back. Having read Kafka in high school, I was infected
with literature for life. Poe, whom I read earlier, at the age of
ten or eleven, also made a tremendous impression — to the
point where I lay awake, desperately trying to make out whether
that wasn’t a heart, after all, thumping underneath the toys
scattered about my bedroom floor.
Reading is a manner of cultivating one’s loneliness. When
you read you’re alone. Yet you share this loneliness with
somebody, through and thanks to the text. You partake of a community
of solitary people — a fact, or rather condition, I like to
think has its aspect of grace. In fourth grade, my teacher forbade
me to borrow more than a handful of books per week. She had seen
me running in and out of the library, and must have thought I ought
to stay outdoors, imbibing the fresh air while kicking the living
daylight out of the other boys on the soccer field. I had no intention
of having any of it. But how could I get my hands on the books now
that I was prevented from perusing the stacks? It took me a while
to figure out a strategy. Then I enlisted the help of a few friends,
who received instructions and borrowed the titles for me. In my
childhood, there really never was anything that could match a long
afternoon, stretched out on the bed with a stack of books next to
you and a pile of ice cream cones nicked from the freezer.
Jarzebinski: So, it’s very easy for you to read books.
Fioretos: Ease has little to do with experience. Since the time
when I read five or seven juvenile novels a day, I’ve become
much slower at reading — to the point of stumbling. Those
days when I used to devour books are long over. If anything, today,
I sample texts. When I’m working on a book of my own, the
only stuff I manage to read is that which doesn’t interfere,
or rather compete, with my own intentions. It tends to be crime
fiction, I fear. I’m looking forward to the day when I can
chunk Lucarelli, Vachss, and the others, in favor of reading children’s
books with my daughter. What better way of musing at the marvel
of reading while distracting yourself?
Jarzebinski: You studied in Stockholm — then went to Paris,
after which you moved to the United States. What was the reason
you went abroad?
Fioretos: Apart from the opposite sex and (European) handball, the
only thing that mattered to me in late puberty was literature. For
a long time, I labored under the impression that I needed to know
— this will sound very pathetic — that I needed to know
the truth about literature. Having finished the gymnasium and having
spent a year in Athens, acquiring a working knowledge of Modern
Greek, I thus set out to study comparative literature in Stockholm.
At that time, in the early 1980s, the most significant contribution
to the understanding of literature generally was referred to as
“deconstruction.” I became interested in the work of
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who once coined the term.
As soon as I had my degree, I left for Paris to study with him.
From there, I made a detour by way of Stockholm, before I began
graduate studies at Yale University, where much of the American
version of deconstruction had been cultivated since the mid-1970s.
Because of these interests — and because of the way in which
Derrida, Paul de Man and others were demonstrating, with graceful
cunning and infinite care, that the border between literature proper
and (philosophical or aesthetic) discourses about it was never certain,
always porous and in dispute — it took me a long time to understand
that whatever truth about literature I managed to attain as a scholar
was likely to be different from the truth I learned as a writer.
As this distinction, this divided truth, finally dawned on me, I
realized I had spent a decade and a half in the academy. It came
as an utter shock.
Jarzebinski: What happened?
Fioretos: By then, I was teaching at the Johns
Hopkins University, and had already published a few books —
both fiction and scholarly monographs. One of them, entitled The
Gray Book, had been an attempt to explore, or rather to celebrate,
the gray area between literature and criticism. Now began a period
of restlessness. I no longer saw the literary need to investigate
the conundrums on which writing tends to be founded. Literature
is so much more than language. In my head, there were too many stories
waiting to be told, and I needed to find a way of articulating them
in the manner they seemed to require — at whatever theoretical
cost. In a way, the books I wrote in the late 1990s, between
The Gray Book and my first novel, Stockholm noir,
were attempts to reprogram myself. Quite frankly, I had lost my
taste for exegesis. I no longer felt the need to learn more about
the mechanics of hermeneutics. Knowing all there is to know about
a car may be admirable; personally, I’m more interested in
driving.
As a writer, you must rely on instinct. The only thing that truly
matters is the first impulse. Yet you can only ever trust the “second”
word, that is, you have to find the word behind the word —
discarding one word for a better one, then that word for yet a better
one. For the critic, the opposite applies. When engaged in interpretatory
adventures, you can never trust your first impulse. You always have
to rely on the second impulse, that is, on reflection. Yet more
often than not, the first word will do. (I’m not saying this
to put scholars down, many of whom are fair writers. But look at
the record. Most academic texts will bear my impression out.) If
you wish, this difference is something like the genome of literature.
It’s a rather pedestrian formula, I admit, and embarrassingly
easy to deconstruct. Still, for me, it engendered two distinct truths
about literature. And once I realised that, it didn’t take
me long to figure out that academic life, in its traditional form,
was not what I’d like to set my heart on.
Jarzebinski: It must take you a long time to write a book, if, all
the time, you have to re-write it, re-read it, then re-write it
again.
Fioretos: Regrettably, I’m not able to shake aces out of my
sleeve every so often, on command. I put together sentences the
way birds pick grain on the ground. At times, I suppose this disposition
has led to moments of, well, anguish. But rewriting is integral
to any writer’s work. And it’s not about complication,
really. Ideally, you begin simply, or simple-mindedly, writing whatever
corresponds to what preoccupies your thoughts. Inadequate is only
the first name for the text thus produced. Full of contorted characters
and tormented twists of phrase, it has little to do with that to
which the alphabet ought to be used. After a while, however, the
text gathers momentum. Or at least a certain complexity. You may
lose the thread; you may never regain it; you may be sidetracked
and end up in an impasse neither calculated nor cherished. But if
you’re lucky, you manage to work your way through this maze
to whatever serves as your text’s end. Then you’ll discover
another kind of straightforwardness, a sort of second-degree simplicity,
which, for those who are careless, may seem almost like what you
started out with, but never is.
For me, it would be lethal to throw up the hands and say, well then,
why not be content with what you began with? Surely there is no
need to complicate things, no need to exert yourself, if the result
is so bewilderingly close in appearance to what you started out
from? The difference, or saving grace, is that the “second”
simplicity is soaked in complexity. Oddly, the text will ring hollow
if you avoid this process.
Nor should one underestimate the importance of the time spent being
inactive. I think it was Flaubert who once termed “the marinade”
those countless hours that you while away spread out on your couch,
seemingly impassive and dejected, not doing much of anything, certainly
nothing of social use. And yet, afterwards, when you’ve finished
your text, you realize those protracted moments were not only vital
but essential to where you were going.
Jarzebinski: Reading your books, I had the impression the text flows
flawlessly. Your novels don’t give the reader the impression
of struggle or effort. Whence does the initial idea come to you?
Fioretos: It arrives on the slithery belly of worms. Ideally, it
should depart on the soft feet of angels.
Jarzebinski: How do you know what to write about?
Fioretos: I’m not convinced it’s promising — or,
at any rate, wise — let alone desirable — to trace the
genealogy of your obsessions. As a writer, thankfully, you’re
often the last person to realize that your mind is set on a particular
item of ideation.
I think no book of mine was possible to write until I had collected
enough impressions, ideas funny or futile, as well as a generous
helping of short-circuits to prevent me from sleeping. Once these
gems and germs have gained a certain critical mass, what’s
needed is to introduce a magnet into the force field. It could be
anything from a quirk of temperament to an unplanned character flaw
or simply a particular tone of voice. As soon as it has been found,
however, these fibs and fragments of imagination, seemingly unconnected,
begin to relate to one another, creating a certain pattern. At that
point, I know there’s a book demanding to be written.
Jarzebinski: Is there a development in your writing?
Fioretos: My early work was about intermediary
zones. I was interested in vagueness and the gray area between,
let’s say, word and image, fact and fiction, life and death.
In short: instability. Later, I realized the books formed —
not a trilogy, that would presuppose a preconceived plan, but something
more modest, perhaps a “trio.” The first part was about
the loss of a dear person in a traffic accident, a Trauerarbeit
of sorts, entitled The Book of Imparting. It dealt with
the ways in which a loved person, though dead, lives on. The second
book, which I’ve already mentioned, was about “gray
literature,” a technical term used by librarians to designate
work that belong neither among fiction nor among fact. In essence,
it told and dramatized the story of a lead pencil — this volatile
writing implement characterized by finitude and forgetting. The
third book, A Book about Phantoms, dealt with spooks and
revenants in film, in life, in literature. All three titles try
to make transitory states or frames of mind stylistically physical
and sensationally palpable. If you want to describe and create an
impression of imprecision, you better be concrete. In my experience,
being vague about vagueness won’t do.
In a technical sense, to me, the most important of these texts was
The Gray Book, which I translated — or rather transmogrified
— into English a few years after its Swedish publication in
1994. It was written at the time when I had started to take seriously
the fact that my literary interests were stronger than my academic
ones. Since, understandably, this preference produced pangs of guilt
in a young assistant professor, who had just gotten his feet up
on the tenure track, I needed to understand how my two inclinations
interacted. Having worked things out and realizing that the trail
in front of me was about to bifurcate, I proceeded to write a book
of short texts termed “vanity routines,” in which voice
was the vehicle of narration. This was literature by an author who
was no longer on track. It had shed its theoretical crutches and
begun to test its wobbly legs. Having gotten away with that, I developed
a taste for prose not guided by argument but by plotline, supported
not by footnotes but by characters. Now there was really no return
to the main line of academe. Finally, I wrote my first novel the
Swedish title of which was Stockholm noir.
Jarzebinski: “Die Seelensucherin,” as the German title
has it . . .
Fioretos: The German title was a tad too esoteric for my taste.
I prefer them dry and non-sentimental. But never mind.
Jarzebinski: . . .relates thematically to your latest book.
Fioretos: Yes. Both novels deal with different notions of the human
being as they evolved and circulated in Europe around 1900. That
doesn’t necessarily make them “historical.” I’m
not interested in retro prose or old-fashioned poses. The books
use a certain amount of historical material, but they undermine,
sometimes liberally, what we assume are facts by testing, through
fiction, the limits of the believable. Also, they’re written
with contemporary concerns in mind. I’m hardly the only person
to have observed a certain congruence between our modern fascination
with the body as well as with what constitutes human agency and
similar discussions a century ago. While very different, in both
periods you can detect a tendency to use biological models of understanding.
Or take our obsession with sexuality. Today’s belief that
the truth about a human being may reside in his or her sexuality
was, well, if not invented or discovered, at least firmly established
some hundred years ago. I find such assumptions productive for a
novel.
The two books are part of a “biological trilogy.” Each
volume takes a different bodily organ as its point of departure.
The first, Stockholm noir, deals with the brain. In it,
a young woman from Berlin travels to the capital of Sweden in order
to find her father, whom she’s met only once in her life.
At the same time (the novel is set in December 1925), a “soul
biologist” by the name of H. H. Schaumberg, who has devoted
his entire career to the question of where, exactly, the soul is
located in the human brain, is leafing through old files pertaining
to his most famous, or rather infamous, case. The patient, obviously,
turns out to be the father of the woman. Slowly the two plots lines
of the book begin to converge. For example, the scientist, modelled
on a famous Swedish neurologist of the time, advocates the theory
that the typology of the human brain corresponds to that of Stockholm.
When my female protagonist arrives in a city covered in snow, she
enters a white maze, creating a path that may or may not correspond
to the way in which the soul supposedly travels in the human brain.
I wanted the manner in which Stockholm noir was written
to have similarities with the way in which the brain operates, that
is to say, with reflection. Thus the narrator, who’s identified
on the last page, speaks from a certain distance, observing what
happens without really participating. Since the book dealt with
the brain and with reflection, in a manner, it was also about freedom
of thought. Without giving the plot away, I suppose you could say
that, at the end, the female protagonist liberates herself from
her past.
Jarzebinski: And the next book?
Fioretos: The second part of the trilogy, The
Truth about Sascha Knisch, which appeared in German translation
in 2002 and will be published in English next year, deals with sexuality,
especially with the male sex, and even more especially with the
testicles. Since it’s a book about sex, it also deals with
instinct. Its hero, or rather anti-hero, Sascha Knisch, does a lot
of things without reflecting, instinctively, which puts him in some
delicate situations. If you read between the lines you’ll
realize he’s the boyfriend of Vera Grund, the girl in the
first book. But that’s not important to know; it merely adds
an aspect to the story. Just like the organs in our body, the three
parts of the trilogy are interrelated but must function independently
of each other.
Knisch, who works extra as a projectionist at a cinema, is a transvestite.
Although I have no first-hand experience of cross-dressing, I believe
I know a fair amount about it metaphorically speaking — which
connects with what we began to talk about. If you grow up as the
child of immigrants in a culture where the language spoken is not
that of your parents, you quickly learn that language is a way of
dressing-up. It certainly functions as the conveyor of semantic
ware, but it’s also — even before you understand it
— a costume, a manner of figuring, configuring and disfiguring
your persona.
In my experience, as an immigrant child, you’re governed by
two impulses. On the one hand, you want to speak the language of
the culture in which you live like a native — in order to
“pass,” as they say. You don’t want people to
hear you have a foreign background. You want to be indistinguishable
and gray. On the other hand — and this is certainly a strong
impulse if you’re a writer — you wish to demonstrate
that you can speak the language just as well, or even better, than
the natives. There’s this opposite tendency to display your
lingual precociousness, to show off. This creates a tension, which
may be benevolent in some aspects, but which also has its tragic-comical
effects. I suppose it’s a little like trying to camouflage
yourself as a peacock. In my understanding, transvestism has a clear
affinity with such ambiguity. Transvestites are people, who feel
as if their true self can only be displayed if they dress up in
the garb of the opposite sex. They cover themselves in order to
reveal themselves; they’re peacocks in hiding.
Just as the first novel dealt with the discipline of neurology,
the second dealt with sexology. The book is set a few years later,
in the summer of 1928, in a city not named but akin to the capital
of the Weimar republic. At the time, Berlin was the home of Magnus
Hirschfeld, often referred to as the “Einstein of Sex,”
who figures in my book under a different name. Hirschfeld ran the
Institute for Sexual Research in the Tiergarten, which was situated
about where the Bundeskanzler now has his offices. It functioned
as clinic, museum, library and think-tank. An untiring advocate
of liberal values, Hirschfeld helped people afflicted because of
their sexuality. He gave advice, performed abortions, tried to de-criminalize
paragraph 175 which prohibited “sodomitic acts,” believing
that the field of sexology didn’t belong to the faculty of
medicine proper.
Jarzebinski: Why?
Fioretos: Because “deviant” sexuality
ought not be considered a sickness. If there were problems, they
were likely to be neither yours nor pathological, but those of society.
Hirschfeld had a large library, containing over 20,000 volumes.
Two thirds of the books scorched during the ignominious book burning
in May 1933 are assumed to have come from his library. His museum,
which contained a great array of medicinal instruments, fetishes,
masturbation machines and the like, was visited by people like Charlie
Chaplin, Sergey Eisenstein and others — gefundenes Fressen
for a novelist.
Jarzebinski: Was Hirschfeld a Jew?
Fioretos: Yes, and a homosexual, and a Social Democrat — pretty
much as wrong as one could be only a few years later. Fortunately,
Hirschfeld was on an international lecture tour in January 1933.
He died a few years later, in Paris, of poor health. The Institute
was raided as soon as the Nazis had won the January elections. Several
former patients had become party members and had advanced in the
hierarchy. Obviously, they didn’t want their files to fall
into the hands of uncomprehending colleagues. After the war, the
people who wrote the history of modern German sexology were former
party members. They had no interest in rehabilitating Hirschfeld,
which is why it wasn’t until the early 1980s, with the emancipatory
gay movement, that the Institute was given proper historical due.
I wanted to write a book that dealt with sexuality in a way that
wasn’t pornographic. On the one hand, I wished to avoid the
tiresome kind of novel that paints the late 1920s as a golden era,
booming with artistic freedom and social promiscuity. (Isherwood,
who stayed at the Institute for a while, did a good job in portraying
the period; there’s no need to try to repeat such an accomplishment.)
On the other hand, I wished to steer clear of the no less tiresome
belief, in much of today’s literature, that the only way to
break with taboo is to flirt with pornography. I wasn’t interested
in an avantgardism that attempts to épater le bourgeois
while feeding him whatever his kinky soul might crave. Rather, I
wished to deal with the problematic of privacy and sexual expression,
as well as the belief that the truth about ourselves resides between
our legs. In short: why is it important to have testicles?
Also, I wanted to construct a story in which the narrator was put
in an uncomfortable — even ambiguous — position, poised
between the urge to lie and the need to come clean. Thus the book
begins by Sascha literally coming out of the closet, dressed in
full female regalia. What could be more embarrassing for a male?
Lying dead on the bed, Sascha claims, is Dora Wilms, the woman with
whom he has been involved. What should he do? He doesn’t want
the world — and much less “mastermind” Manetti,
head of the city’s Homicide Squad — to know what he
has been up to. On the other hand, how can he prove his innocence
without revealing the embarrassing facts of his intimate life? Gradually,
the plot of the book becomes something of a cover-up story, in which
Sascha tries to prove what didn’t happen and thus to clear
his name while disguising his sexual practises. Ultimately, as a
reader, you begin to wonder whether he is really revealing the truth
— and if so, what kind of revelation that is.
The third part of the trilogy will deal with emotion. I’m
a bit superstitious, so I prefer not to tell you which organ will
serve as the organizing trope. But perhaps I may point out that
we don’t feel with our hearts alone, but with other organs,
too. If Stockholm noir dealt with reflection or, if you
prefer, with freedom (of thought), and The Truth about Sascha
Knsich dealt with instinct or with brotherhood (the testicles
have a tendency to show up in pairs), the third book will deal with
the remaining item of the revolutionary trinity: equality.
Jarzebinski: Is it true that you once said a writer should write
books that combine science and fiction?
Fioretos: I don’t think so. Still, there are interesting areas
where science and fiction intersect, and I’m sure it’d
be worthwhile to pit, in a novel, their respective methods of perceiving
the world against each other.
Conventionally, science is understood as a method of acquiring knowledge
about the world. In order not to influence the object of scrutiny
unduly, the scientist must maintain a discreet distance from it.
Literature, on the other hand, tends to be not about observation,
but about involvement with the world. I realize this distinction
between control and participation is flat-footed. But let’s
go with it. Goethe once spoke of “soft” or “tender
empiricism,” suggesting that, as a writer, one must make oneself
“intimately one” with the object of one’s reflection.
To use an image: you have to walk into the woods. Only then will
you be able to observe the individual tree, the single leaf, the
particular character of the bark. What you can’t do, however,
is to abstract yourself from your surroundings to the point where
you’re able to perceive the whole as a “forest.”
That’s the method of science and philosophy, where you attempt
to establish rules or concepts that may master and cover the plurality
of singular expressions. Instead of perceiving each deviant detail,
you step back and conceive of the whole.
Especially in Stockholm noir, I tried to investigate these
different methods of engaging with the world. One the one hand,
there’s the young woman without prior notions of Stockholm,
who enters the unknown territory of the city, attentive and always
on the move. On the other, there’s the old scientist, well
acquainted with his hometown but cranky and immobile, who tries
to map the activities of the brain onto the city. I suppose you
could say that whereas the former method is warm, a way of embracing
the world in all its bewildering detail, the latter remains cold,
a manner of freezing the world into a pattern. The text weights
these two strategies against each other, in order to achieve a balanced
temperature. If you will, it’s about the 37 degrees Celsius
of the living human body.
Jarzebinski: You’re also a translator. Why did you choose
to render books by Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin and Vladimir
Nabokov into Swedish?
Fioretos: Out of love. I’m not, and am not likely to become,
a professional translator. My only excuse for turning books into
Swedish is that I’ve fallen in love with them. Perhaps the
act of translation is about understanding that attraction; perhaps
it’s an attempt to sober up. I’m loathe to tell.
Mind you, I’m a chaste lover, having translated only seven
or eight books, plus a smattering of poems, essays, and short stories.
Of the writers I’ve given Swedish identities over the years,
Nabokov is the one who has kept me most busy. I’ve done three
of his books, and just agreed to do a fourth: Lolita. The
attraction is different in each case. For example, what fascinated
me in Auster’s oeuvre was a slim volume entitled The Invention
of Solitude, a meditation on the loss of his father and the
potential loss of his son. I was quite taken by the book, and since
I discovered we shared several literary preferences (for Mallarmé’s
poems about the death of his son Anatole; for the work of André
du Bouchet; for Nadezha Mandelstam’s heartbreaking memoirs;
for Collodi’s Pinocchio, etc.), it almost felt as
if I had written the book myself. Obviously, I needed to understand
why — hence the translation.
As for Hölderlin, well, I once wrote an essay on his rendition
of Sophocles’s Antigone, especially the way in which
his translatory practice relates to his adjacent notes on translation.
I chose to render Hölderlin’s so-called “patriotic
hymns” into Swedish, the twelve odd poems he wrote around
the time he was working on the Antigone, in the years just
before he went mad. Some of them were translated in the 1930-40s,
a period perhaps not known for its sober tonalities of voice, but
most had never been rendered into Swedish. I wanted to present a
different Hölderlin — less lofty and pathetic, more grounded,
yes, even prosaic at times.
In Nabokov, what I’ve always admired is his delight in the
confluence of memory and language. He has the ability, as few writers
do, to make something happen in your mouth when you read him. Also,
I suppose what appealed was the fact that English wasn’t his
mother tongue. Some critics consider this the weak point in his
prose; supposedly, it makes his books artificial. I don’t
mind; in fact, I think that’s one of their saving graces.
Nabokov has an ear for things within the English language, which
you don’t necessarily observe if you’re a native speaker
— matters pertaining to the shape, sound and texture of words.
I wanted to see if there was a way of doing the same in Swedish,
a language which is sedate and doesn’t tend to take to fancy
of many kinds.
Jarzebinski: Have these writers taught you anything?
Fioretos: Nabokov once claimed that, as a novelist, you must perform
three different roles. First, you need to be a storyteller, that
is, you should know how a story functions and have the knack to
tell it right. That’s largely a question of timing. Second,
the novelist must be a teacher, that is, his text ought to tell
the reader something about the world. Call it a question of morals.
Third, the novelist must be an enchanter, charming the reader with
the way in which a world may be wrought out of mere words. That
can only be a matter of magic.
When Nabokov is at his worst, he’s overdoing the enchanter
bit. As a reader, you’re quickly full with his beatific language,
and stop reading after five to ten pages. But when he’s good
— and Nabokov’s good more often in one book than most
writers in their entire career — the three roles, coordinated,
are kept in splendid balance. At that moment, you experience that
telltale thrill coursing up and down your spine; you literally shiver
from reading. As far as I’m concerned, this quiver may be
the only reliable proof of good literature. It produces a biological
sensation.
Jarzebinski: How many languages do you speak? English, German, French,
Greek . . .
Fioretos: Stop, stop. My Swedish is all right.
Although no foreigner to embarrassment, my English and German are,
too. But since I speak Greek only in the summer, at the beach taverna
or at the local post office, it’s no longer of much educated
use. And as for my French, well, it has become something of an embarrassment.
I can raise mon verre and accompany the gesture with appropriate
words. I suppose I can even still sort out the philosophical complexities
of notions such as “la différance” or “la
tradition historico-métaphysique.” But that’s
about it.
Jarzebinski: Do you have a yearning?
Fioretos: A yearning? For what?
Jarzebinski: For your country?
Fioretos: My country? You must be joking.
Jarzebinski: You don’t have one?
Fioretos: I’ve never been able to understand
why the question of one’s national loyalty requires a single-minded
answer. I suppose I could reply I consider my spine Greek, my nerves
Austrian, or rather Viennese, and my tongue Swedish. But I’m
not sure that answers your question. Stronger than my loyalty to
these three countries is the feeling of not belonging. If anything,
I feel like the difference between being Greek, Austrian,
Swedish.
Jarzebinski: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you.
© Foreigner
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