>>>ALL ABOUT THE VILLAGES<<<

PURPOSE | HOUR [2] | Contact | VOYAGE BY CANOE [1] | IMMORTAL | ART OF ASKING | VILLAGES | LYNX | Guests | ACT 2 ENTRANCE | HOUR [1] | PHOTO [2] | PHOT [3] | CANOE NOTE + PHOTO | Subday Blue/ La Cuisine | PHOTO [6] | EXTRA=UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES... | Whats New | Photoalbum-HOUR | SPUREN/ TRACES OF THE LOST

THIS PAGE IS DEVOTED TO "Walk About the Villages", THE CULMINATING WORK OF HANDKE'S "Homecoming Cycle"/ Ueber die Doerfer; BELOW COMES THE COMPLETE AND NOT THE EDITED VERSION OF THE POSTSCRIPT I WROTE TO MY TRANSLATION, AS PUBLISHED BY ARIADNE PRESS; PRODUCTION PHOTOS FROM Vim Wender's PREMIERE AND OF OTHER PRODUCTIONS WILL APPEAR ELSEWHERE ON THIS SITE
 
Fuer die Therapeuten, von Peter Handke


Gefaehrde die Arbeit noch mehr.

Sei nicht die Hauptperson.

Such die Gegenueberstellung.

Aber sei absichtslos.

Vermeide Hintergedanken.

Verschweige nichts.

Sei weich und stark.
Sei schlau, lass dich ein und verachte den Sieg.

Beobachte nicht, pruefe nicht, sondern bleib geistesgegenwaertig bereit fuer die Zeichen.

Sei erschuetterbar.
Zeig deine Augen, wink die anderen in die Tiefe, sorge fuer den Raum und betrachte jeden in seinem Bild.

Entscheide nur begeistert.
Scheitere ruhig.
Vor allem hab Zeit und nimm Umwege.
Lass dich ablenken.
Mach sozusagen Urlaub.
UEberhoer keinen Baum und kein Wasser.
Kehr ein, wo du Lust hast, und goenn dir die Sonne.

Vergiss die Angehoerigen, bestaerke die Unbekannten, bueck dich nach Nebensachen, weich aus in die Menschenleere, pfeif auf das Schicksalsdrama, missachte das Unglueck, zerlach den Konflikt.
Beweg dich in deinen Eigenfarben, bis du im Recht bist und das Rauschen der Blaetter suess wird.

Geh ueber die Doerfer, ich komme dir nach.

=============================================================================

monologue final de la piece

Par les villages

de Peter Handke

Dossier pedagogique

LE CHaTEAU DE FABLE


Ateliers Nova

ecriture filmique — ecriture theatrale

Une des specificites de la compagnie le Chateau de Fable porte sur l'accompagnement systematique de chacune de ses creations par des ateliers de sensibilisation a celles-ci.

Ces ateliers s'adressent au milieu scolaire, associatif, comme a toute personne desireuse de connaitre notre travail (abonne, usager, simple citoyen).

Leur objectif est de permettre un contact sensible avec notre creation, un apprentissage des codes du theatre. En proposant a chaque participant de travailler a son tour comme nous-memes avons travaille lors des repetitions.

Dans le cas de Nova d'apres Par les Villages de Peter Handke, nous avons cherche quelle etait =la petite musique handkienne=. Pour cela nous nous sommes plonges dans son ecriture qu'elle soit theatrale, romanesque ou cinematographique. Et malgre les differences liees au support (theatre, litterature, cinema) nous avons peu a peu decouvert comme l'ecrit si bien le traducteur de ses pieces Georges Arthur Goldsmith que toute l'œuvre de Peter Handke tend vers un point : parvenir, a force de concentration, a ce point d'intimite où celui qui ecrit bascule en celui qui le lit. Passer du plus grand anonymat a la plus profonde intimite. Autrement dit, tout le travail de cet auteur est contenu dans la replique qui constitue l'unique texte de l'une de ses pieces - Gaspard :

Je voudrais etre un jour ce qu'un jour un autre a ete.
Cette replique sera le fil conducteur de nos ateliers.

Par un travail propose a certaines classes sur le film Les Ailes du Desir (realisation Wim Wenders – Dialogues Peter Handke) et a d'autres sur le texte de Nova nous voulons conduire les participants a se familiariser avec des codes de lecture apparemment reserves au cercle ferme des cinephiles et des universitaires.

Parce que le processus a l'Å“uvre dans l'ecriture de Peter Handke est cette quete de l'autre dans son alterite nous pensons qu'il peut etre particulierement formateur de proposer ces ateliers a des personnes qui a priori semblent eloigner de cette ecriture.

Nous voudrions a travers ces ateliers permettre a chacun de ne pas avoir honte de sa sensibilite et de pouvoir l'exprimer en public, creer ce que Peter Handke decrit comme une des formes du bonheur : ici et maintenant c'est la fete du connaissable.

Descriptif

Rappel de notre hypothese de recherche : il y a chez Peter Handke une constante d'ecriture, un theme central qui parcourt son Å“uvre, quel que soit le support emprunte (scenaristique, romanesque, theatral).

Notre axe de recherche portera donc sur une analyse de deux de ses Å“uvres, l'une filmique : Les ailes du desir, l'autre theatrale : Nova.

Comme nous l'avons indique en preambule, l'analyse filmique sera confiee a certaines classes et la pratique theatrale a d'autres.

1 – Atelier de decryptage du film Les ailes du desir.

Il sera propose aux eleves de se transformer un temps en semiologue a travers l'analyse de l'ecriture de Peter Handke dans le film Les ailes du desir de Wim Wenders.

Cette transformation se deroulera en trois temps de deux heures soit 6 heures au total.

1er temps : le visionnage en classe.

Apres une breve presentation du projet Nova, les eleves se repartiront en huit sous-groupes. Chacun des groupes aura la responsabilite d'un des codes de l'analyse filmique.

Ces codes sont :

I – Code des couleurs : y a t il unite de la couleur ou differents types de couleurs, lesquels, quand, pourquoi ?

2 – Code des cadrages : quels sont les cadrages utilises – plan large – plan moyen – plan serre – close up – quand, qui ; a quelle frequence, pourquoi ?

3 – Code du montage : de quelle nature sont les plans, plan sequence, plan court ? Comment s'enchainent-ils, fondu, cut ? Comment s'alternent-ils ? pourquoi ?

4 – Code des objets et des costumes : etablir un repertoire des objets et un repertoire des costumes. Comment les classifier ? Quel sens apporter a cette classification ?

5 – Code spatio-temporel : dans quel temps et quel espace se deroule l'action ? etablir une topographie et une temporalite de la fiction ? Degager la symbolique.

6 – Code textuel : comment est compose le texte ? S'apparente t'il toujours a un meme type d'ecriture, a plusieurs ? a quel(s) genre(s) appartiennent-ils ? Y a t il une forme dominante ? Pourquoi ?

7 - Code sonore non-textuel : de quoi est constitue la bande sonore, musique, bruitage ? a quels moments, ses sons interviennent ? Pourquoi ?

8 – Code de denomination : quels sont les noms des personnages ? Que signifient-ils etymologiquement ? a partir de l'etymologie de chacun des noms peut-on en deduire un systeme, une famille ?

Suite a cette repartition des taches ; il sera demande aux eleves de visionner ce film en classe sous forme de DVD et d'effectuer un premier reperage des indices membres de la rubrique dont ils ont la responsabilite.

Au terme de ce premier reperage un premier tour de table sera effectue pour savoir ce que chacun a decele en ce qui concerne sa rubrique. Fort de cette premiere collecte d'informations et de leur mise en rapport, on degagera les axes de recherche sous forme de questions auxquelles il conviendra a chaque groupe de repondre par une analyse plus poussee du film.

2e temps : La mise en pratique de l'analyse

Pour repondre aux questions posees, les eleves auront a leur disposition trois elements : le DVD du film lui-meme, le site Internet cine-qua-nox et le scenario du film.

Le DVD ou plutot les DVD du film (il en faut en effet au minimum trois exemplaires pour que les groupes puissent les visionner autant de fois que necessaire) circuleront entre les groupes pendant une periode de trois semaines.

Le site Internet cine-qua-nox. Ce site cree par Guy Magen (semiologue) propose aux internautes des photogrammes d'un film (en moyenne 500). Grace a ce catalogue, les eleves peuvent analyser les images (cadre, composition, premier, deuxieme, arriere plan, lumiere, couleurs, costumes, accessoires) et surtout de les mettre en comparaison (premiere et derniere image du film, continuite d'un cadre, d'une lumiere dans des sequences eloignees les unes des autres).

Le scenario (publie aux editions de L'Avant-Scene Cinema), agremente de nombreuses photos, permet d'avoir un acces au texte plan par plan accompagne du descriptif du cadre.

Que ce soit pour le visionnage du DVD, les recherches sur le site cine-qua-nox ou pour l'analyse de l'ecriture a partir du scenario afin que les eleves ne s'epuisent pas en vaine recherche ; il sera donne aux eleves des reperes ainsi que des raccourcis.

N.B : Si cette analyse est presentee comme une veritable recherche devant conduire a une decouverte, on peut raisonnablement escompter une veritable implication des eleves. D'où la necessaire complicite/complementarite du binome enseignant/intervenant.

3e temps : Mise en commun des travaux

de recherche et l'analyse.

Chaque groupe presentera en classe le resultat de ses recherches et la conclusion a laquelle il arrive.

Suite a ces exposes, la classe devra mettre en rapport chaque recherche, comme autant de pieces d'un puzzle pour constituer la figure centrale du film, le sens profond du film, le message.

Dotes de cette analyse, il sera propose aux eleves de l'exposer en public lors d'une projection du film prevu a cet effet par le cinema de Velizy devant les eleves qui auront travaille quant a eux sur le texte de Nova ainsi qu'en presence du public habituel.

2 – Atelier de pratique theatrale sur le texte de Nova.

En amont de cet atelier, il sera demande aux eleves d'avoir lu la piece Par les villages

(L'arche-editeur), de choisir et apprendre deux phrases du monologue final. Ces phrases ne figurent pas obligatoirement a la suite dans le texte. Leur choix doit correspondre soit a une emotion lors de la lecture soit a une incomprehension. Les deux phrases retenues devront etre inscrites sur deux feuilles distinctes. L'atelier de pratique theatrale d'une duree de deux heures par classe est constitue de deux parties. Pour un deroulement agreable, une salle suffisamment grande et degagee des bureaux et des chaises est souhaitable.

1ere partie : travail preparatoire au texte.

Cette partie d'une demi-heure est constituee d'une serie d'exercices (trois) qui ont d'abord pour objet d'etablir un contact et une atmosphere de confiance entre les eleves et l'intervenant. Ces exercices sont egalement un excellent echauffement pour se preparer au passage devant les autres.

Exercice 1 : The wawe.

Cet exercice consiste en l'apprentissage en commun d'une partie du texte de Nova. Les eleves forment un cercle. Chaque eleve doit memoriser tres vite quatre a cinq mots du texte (differents pour chacun) puis restituer correctement la chaine du texte ainsi apprise. Cet apprentissage integre, le plan de la classe est modifie, afin que les eleves ne retrouvent pas a leurs cotes celui/celle qui avait memorise le mot precedent le sien. Cette disposition obtenue, le texte est de nouveau enonce en vue d'obtenir un enchainement parfait. Cet enchainement atteint, on se livre alors a partir de cette base a une serie de propositions d'interpretation (a voix basse, sur le mode de la confidence, de l'evidence, de la decouverte) en essayant d'atteindre l'objectif suivant : que toutes ces voix n'en forment plus qu'une.

Exercice 2 : L'adresse au partenaire

Les eleves forment a nouveau un cercle. A va au centre du cercle et adresse sa premiere phrase du texte de Nova a un B de son choix. B va repondre a A par une phrase du texte puis remplacer A au centre du cercle pour adresser sa seconde phrase a un C de son choix et ainsi de suite. Lorsque tout le monde est passe, l'exercice est reproduit A reste A, B reste B, etc… mais accelere afin que l'alternance texte/mouvement devienne comme une choregraphie. Puis cette choregraphie obtenue, des directions d'interpretation pour l'ensemble du groupe sont donnees (le dire dans l'urgence, le dire au monde entier, le dire comme un cri d'espoir).

Exercice 3 : la post-synchronisation

Un eleve se trouve en situation d'acteur un second en situation de « post-synchronisateur ». Concretement l'eleve/acteur donne a l'eleve/post-synchronisateur une feuille sur laquelle est inscrite l'une des phrases de son choix. Le post-synchronisateur devient la voix de l'acteur, chaque fois qu'il prononce un mot, l'acteur le reproduit muettement. Pour que cet exercice permette a l'acteur de prendre le temps et l'espace de cette phrase, le post-synchronisateur doit etre attentif a l'acteur, attendre qu'il se detende, semble naturel pour envoyer un mot, laisser un temps avant que d'envoyer le suivant. Lorsque la phrase a ete dite entierement. Le couple acteur/post-synchronisateur doit tenter de reproduire et ameliorer le dessin qu'ils ont invente lors de la premiere tentative.

2ere partie : interpretation du texte.

Les phrases sont maintenant memorisees. Les eleves ont pu ressentir par ailleurs combien le temps et la mise en espace etaient constitutives de l'adresse d'un texte au public. Le travail d'interpretation peut commencer.

Il sera demande a chaque eleve de reprendre, cette fois-ci seul, la phrase qu'il avait travaille en post-synchronisation en l'augmentant de la seconde phrase et en l'adressant a une personne de son choix.

Une fois que chacun aura interprete ses phrases pour une personne, il sera demande de reprendre la sequence en l'ouvrant cette fois-ci a l'ensemble - l'ensemble, signifiant chaque autre. Les deux phrases seront ainsi repetees jusqu'a ce que chaque eleve spectateur ait reçu au moins un mot. En fonction du rendu obtenu, un travail de direction d'acteur sera propose pour affiner la proposition afin que la sensibilite puisse servir la comprehension et aller vers notre fil directeur :

Je voudrais etre un jour ce qu'un jour

un autre a ete.

3eme partie : presentation publique

Les eleves etant convies a la projection du film Les ailes du desir suivie de son analyse faite par les eleves participant a la section ecriture filmique auront a conclure cette seance par une presentation de leur interpretation (meme si toute la classe est requise, ne passeront sur scene que ceux qui le desirent). Nous laisserons in fine a chacun de determiner si de l'ensemble des travaux presentes, il existe une constante d'ecriture chez Peter Handke.

En resume

En amont de la venue des eleves au spectacle Nova il est propose aux enseignants et aux classes de 3eme et de Lycee deux types d'atelier :

1 – ecriture filmique – 6h d'atelier – 3 x 2h –

1/1 – Repartition de la classe en 8 groupes d'analyse et visionnage en classe du film.


1/2 – Expose des analyses et de leur conclusion par les groupes et composition de l'analyse finale.

1/3 – Projection du film et presentation de son analyse.

2 – Pratique theatrale – 4h d'atelier – 2 x 2h –

2/1 – Atelier de pratique visant a amener chaque eleve a interpreter deux phrases de son choix du texte.

2/2 – Presentation (facultative) des interpretations au terme de la projection publique du film Les ailes du desir et de son analyse.

Intervenant / formateur : Claude Bonin – metteur en scene.

 

 

 

 


 

 

 







THIS IS MOST OF A LONG PIECE ABOUT UEBER DIE DOERFER/WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, WHICH FIRST APPEARED AS THE POSTSCRIPT OF MY TRANSLATION, AS PUBLISHED BY ARIADNE PRESS IN 1996



W.A.T.V. HEAD-ON

THE TITLE & THE PLACE & PLAY-PLACES

TIME & THE "TIME PLAYS"

Syntax; Alternating Discourse

THE HOME-COMING CYCLE & ITS COMMONALITIES :

Nature, The Child, Pathos

Medievalism & Heartfelt Irony; Didactics

DRAMATIC MEANS

As Collage; As an Essay

THE CHARACTERS & SUGGESTIONS FOR PRODUCTIONS

THE TRANSLATION The "Task"; Handke's "Sound Advice"

And in the Analytic Situation

Aftermath

Notes [1-40]

The Larger & the Dramatic Background;

Glosses on "Dancing Language," "Being," "Thresholds," etc.

W.A.T.V. HEAD-ON

"Should the dramatic poem be my story and that of my family and siblings? -- No, compared to what I experienced with my relatives (and they with me) it should be a great invention," Handke wrote in
D.G.D.B. [1]

W.A.T.V.'s underlying "STORY LINE", its skeletal "occasion," is the "prodigal" but homesick writer-journeyman Gregor's [Handke's favorite self-appellation, also in A Moment of True Feeling and his

1994 novel Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht [1994] return to his home village to sort out the disagreement he and his brother Hans, a construction worker, and his shopkeeper sister Sophy are having over the disposition of their parents' house: "They built it almost entirely alone and so sunk a few years of their life into it. The land, too, was only made arable with the labor of their hands: They seized a spring in a rock and laid pipes yards underground -- do you know what that means? -- leading the water to the garden and to the
house." The simple symbolism suffices to build a Gaudi castle that seeks to encompass the "world village" and indeed suffices for an anchor, for the objectification of the "purely personal." Poetically charged objectified subjectivity is the formula to which this can be
reduced. Moreover, W.A.T.V. has the simplicity of the bedrock of Handke's and therefore of everyone's family story. Starting with three siblings and a set of dead parents, the "Site Mother" and the "Old Woman," the sense of family is extended gradually throughout the play into something universal. [2] However, the defense of self-made property goes hand in hand with little ambivalence towards the rich and powerful: "Today the mighty

are the disenchanted. Haven't they lacked all secrets for ages?... They are unriddled and resoundingly dead," Gregor the Generous ultimately resolves the conflict among the siblings through self-abnegation, which is certainly a daring thing to throw in the faces of the "fat Austrians" that made Handke throw up with disgust in W. O. W. "Stop gabbing about twos of this or that and don't offer the devil's profile to your descendants?" Yet, as in most instances, this proposition, too, is balanced, in the over-all argumentation by Sophy's: "Show me the one who claims to be so wise as to have renounced and I will show you the master of excuses."
The ACTION [as compared to the "story line" that was grazed above]

in this by and large very still piece, quite properly are the

sentences: the words are in the foreground, that is what you are forced to hearken to, that is what affects you, you are meant to reflect with your heart and soul and mind. Simply as most of the sentences are cast, novels' worth of living and observing and imagining and literary experience lies behind each of them. Thus they approximate hieroglyphics, condense, become archaic, are held by an image, the older language; most every sentence is as rich as a metaphor, they are even haikus of sorts. And are made to live anew --e.g. Strindberg's "It's a pity about us humans" becomes "It's no pity about us humans," in Hans' angry speech.

THE TITLE & THE PLACE AND THE "PLAY PLACES"
Did Handke mention, in writing in 1981 that he was sending a new play, that it's title was Uber die Dorfer? -- I don't recall. However, the seven-league boots title "Across the Villages" under which it packed with me for many years never really fit. Nor [as simply] did "About the Villages" do the title trick. Courtesy of a Roger Downey nudge I finally took "the plunge" to call my version WALK About The Villages, a several imprecation from the dramatic poem itself. After all, W.A.T.V. has the primordial quality of the forever-primitive's forever both familiar and estranged existential walk-about the world village; whose world's play-place-boards, by the end of the piece, amazingly glow with the sense of being both revivified and cleansed: how did the wizard achieve this exorcism? "Let us this evening be who we are --
human beings of a primordial time, and use the tongues inside our

mouths to bend the moon behind the boughs, the snailhouse in the mud

and iron rods in the cement into one unity." -- That kind of poetic

existentialism is bedrock here. This is the existentialist room in his

many existentialist mansions and covered wagons that Peter Handke is

inhabiting at the time of the writing of W.A.T.V. [3]

#

Reading around D.G.D.B. [Die Geschichte des Bleistifts, the as yet

untranslated successor to Weight of the World (W.O.W.)] which is so

informative on the thought that Handke gives to his work, I find:

"Among all the dramatists Aeschylus strikes me as the most complete;

no intrigue, only the power of words; pure drama." And: "It is

possible to repeat something else from Greek drama, to play something

in front of a place: in front of palace, in front of a tent, in front

of a grove; so that the actions, the story, what is violent occurs

inside, invisibly: 'Medea goes into the house to kill her children.'"

The theater places in which W.A.T.V. seeks to evoke a primordial

sense of being are: in front of the curtain -- Scenes I & III; the

space in front of a construction site [II], and before a cemetery wall

[IV]. There is no further mise en scene. The rest of the world, the

world off stage, the natural world and its significance, and what

ROLOFF 3 W.A.T.V./P.S.
occurs inside the "barracks" and behind the "cemetery wall", are

indeed evoked solely by means of poetic language; with the result that

W.A.T.V..'s drama -- "Places, too, have their dramas: perhaps they are

the last dramas, the dramas of dramas" -- like its dramatic figures,

become intimately drenched with a specific sense of the general and a

generalized sense of specific place.

In W.A.T.V. Handke seeks to have his audience entertain every

aspect of our being on the earth [which aspects will not be enumerated

here! these notes merely provide pointers, are not a complete gloss]

and the means he uses is the deceptive simplicity and genius of his

version of the Alternating Discourse of Greek drama. However, W.A.T.V.

weaves the stories of a different set of gods and demi-gods into one

fabric.[4] There is the "tragic dignity" of these figures which, here,

is lent to a different set of personae, whom Handke has frequently

compares to lost royalty: "Tomorrow maybe we'll be nothing. Day after

tomorrow we'll be interred and not even be a footnote in the history

books. But the white cloud graves high above will always be our

shrines. We are the fatherless, who have been set free, who lack a

legitimate homeland, who are bracketed out of our places, the

beautiful strangers, the great unknowns, the soulfully slow, the

people of all time."

These protagonists "display" themselves in their long speeches;

[5] and, in what they say about each other, round out their highly

complex "simple" characters. The alternating discourse, and its

disputes are both intimate and public, with the result that the

division into private and public spheres is eliminated in this manner!

At least for the duration of the performance of the play. For, the

audience, at critical moments, is addressed, is not taken for granted.

Because W.A.T.V. guards itself against both too favorable put perhaps

not against too ill a reception with certain, for Handke, very ancient

Public Insult-like Surprise-Symphony attacks on the audience: [6] "And

everywhere inbetween the clattering, the battering, the snickering,

the muttering, the dickering, the sputtering, the cackling, the

heckling, the simpering, the scribbling, the groveling, the

ROLOFF 4 W.A.T.V./P.S.
shystering, the badgering of business," etc.; which attacks were a

joy for this translator's serial sandbox to play in! [7] And hissing

sibilants I was too, by the time I finished that section! D.G.D.B.:

"Say nothing except in fury or some other form or enthusiasm: dramatic

poem."



The plan or dream for W.A.T.V. may lie as far back as A Short Letter

Long Farewell [1971] where the "Austrian Playwright" and "Austrian

Dramaturg" discuss the dialectical benefits that may accrue to

civilization from a presentation of the "exemplary" on stage.[8] And

W.A.T.V. is certainly "edifying", and renovates the whole idea of

"edification", too, in this unedifying world. Moreover, it renovates,

salvages the "classics" in the sense of quoting them when it is

possible to quote them revivifyingly, rings changes on them, creates

new constellations with these re-arrangements. And the classics being

revivified are as hoary as Pindar and Parmenidis and spring chicken

like Nietzsche and Strindberg and Bresson! [9]

W.A.T.V. is the more emotional piece [10] that Handke had wanted

to write after The Ride Across lake Constance [1970] & They Are Dying

Out [1973]: no lack of feeling here, nearly the whole range of them;

the feelings become powerfully musical, including supreme knowledge of

the unharmonious "decrescendo" of enraged frustration: "Sing the song

of woe. Scream in rhythm. Rise against so-called creation and, with

all your might in the wrong key, sing our song of woe and

revenge.(They wail off key with all their might.)!"

W.A.T.V. is also an anti-naturalist, anti-lower-depth play. Handke

already derided Kroetz's "real" people in T.A.D.O. Here, he performs

the counter-demonstration. -- That's what's so nice about Handke the

writer, he'll come out looking like an obnoxiously arrogant fool

criticizing Thomas Mann as "a very bad writer" and then straighten out

the complicated boxes of Mann's syntax for us; here "everyman and

everywoman" become heroes, and not croaking human detritus; and Handke

actually has the talent to demonstrate what he has in mind in giving

speech to his crackers instead of reproducing the broken-down language

ROLOFF 5 W.A.T.V./P.S.
of a brutalized folk. Question is whether these "country folk" have

the ear left to listen to a language that at moments is a clear and

"simple" as a dew drop. Probably not. Dew drops have to be pre-packed

in just the right way to become consumable. Perhaps they always did.

Being ennobled only makes these "clouds" uptight, such genuine

generosity is suspect.

The rather direct influence of a simplified-down Adalbert Stifter

is undeniable especially in Gregor's narrative of his wandering return

in Scene II; the planes of Cezanne, the drawing of van Ruysdael are

aspects of Handke's invariable renovation by means of a transposition

of genre [11]: all in all, W.A.T.V. is something new if only the "old"

made grandly new and not by means of a buckshot load of dry chicken

shit either! It is a new classic in its own right, and not classical.

W.A.T.V. thus not only encompasses a variety of genres, but also a

number of different ways of literary representation: within a lyrical

narrative basis there surges a more or less subterranean drama in the

exchange of arguments in the alternating discourse -- as endlessly on-

going as dream dialogue [The position "Here I stand, everyone is in

the right being what creates the ambiguity, and what an ambiguity it

is!"]. The stories that the figures tell about each other and their

region and its past weaves an over-all narrative fabric, that if you

have the time can be thematically dismembered into its various

strands, creating a novelistic-painterly overall canvas. And it seeks

to be prophetic, too! And didactic! And it "oracles!"



TIME & THE "TIME" PLAYS

Within Handke's dramatic work W.A.T.V. is the first in a cycle of, I

would say, four works: the subsequent drama The Play of Questions, the

screenplay [or shall we say the film as poetic prose text as fairy

tale] Absence -- though I would have to say that Absence is more

closely related to Question than Question is to W.A.T.V.; the counter-

text to all three being The Hour That We Didn't Know Each Other.



ROLOFF 6 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Stationary ["Here I stand."] and declamatory as W.A.T.V. is,

therefore it scarcely wanders like the parable "troupe" in Play of

Questions or in Absence with their ever-receding horizon lines. Yet

"Recount the Horizon!" Nova admonishes in her last speech in W.A.T.V.

and not only Gregor but some of other figures are able to recount

quite a few of them!

What all four plays share is a particular way of imposing their

time on their audience: "Walk slowly and so assume form yourself,

without which no distance assumes shape... The moving clouds, even as

they rush, slow you down... Walk so far until you tell details apart,

so far until the vanishing lines show up in the confusion; so slowly

until the world belongs to you again, so slowly that it becomes clear

how it does not belong to you... Move -- so that you can be slow:

slowness is the secret, and the earth is sometimes something very

light: a hovering, a moving, a weightless image, a realm of sense, a

light its own -- take over this image for your walking on: it shows

the way, and without the image of a way there is no thinking on..." is

how Nova enunciates what the syntax and the slowly moving, nearly

static nature of the play itself impose on the listener-beholder.

What Handke preaches, at least in this respect, he has all the

talent in the world to effect, because this can be done only

syntactically, with words or images [architectonic hunks of them] in

particular sequences, that is how the audience's experience of time

can be affected; again a now very ancient and deep syntactical

intention of Handke's; another aspect of the transposition of genres

that he engineers with seeming ease. D.G.D.B.: "To be epic means to

keep stopping and to retard harmonically."

German and other audiences, however, were not only unresponsive to

these "time plays'" rhetoric: "You're in a country that is as small as

it is mean: that is full of prisoners who've been forgotten in their

cells, and even fuller of forgetful jailkeeps who are fatter in their

offices after every infamy," etc. [12] Unresponsive the audience has

been in general to the dramatic poem's and the first three "time

pieces"' becalming sense of country time -- the "tender and slow is

the pace of these speeches" [13] [when they are not "dramatic"] and to

the time and pace of long, pensive rural walks.





ROLOFF 7 W.A.T.V./P.S.
SYNTAX

The figures in W.A.T.V. are characterized by, are differentiated from

each other, through their SYNTAX: the reader need only read the

opening of each protagonists' first speech to realize that each of

them, despite the gradual pace that underlies the piece as a whole,

has a syntax uniquely her or his own. Syntax is not a manner here, it

goes very deep, is not some idiosyncrasy; these are not speech

"mannerisms", indeed all matters of that kind -- the play can be taken

at its word, it has cleansed itself of them.

"The piece must really be rendered sentence by sentence" Handke

advised me during the translation process. -- One reason certainly

among others that the sentences do not flow into each other in the old-

accustomed prosaic way; this is not a Leierkasten, no hurdy-gurdy, nor

"metro-rail" or a metronome. The rhythms are meant to pound just the

way they were, ultimately, pounded out, just the way Mr. Handke -- a

deep inner dirigible ear listened carefully and obediently and

fruitfully to him in this instance -- wanted it with his 'risings and

fallings,' and therefore the text is set 'ragged right'.

Handke not only has control of syntax at the breathing level, but

of the level of amplification of the sound: If he wants to be loud,

since generally he is the quietest of writers, all you need do, if

your ear fails to pick up these changes in modulation in W.A.T.V., is

to expose it to that tank which the "troupe" encounters in Absence.

Each clanking clattering grinding screeching gear sets my teeth on

edge even now. And I haven't read the book for three years; and used

to like loud music clubs! In W.A.T.V. the sound images, here, are

elicited in the imagination of the audience where they reside as

memories. D.G.D.B. "Imagination is not a form of creation. Imagination

is a warming of what already exists... Only when what had existed has

been raised into the realm of the imagination and returns in that way,

does it become real to me: imagination as the interpretive return."



The Larger Background & The Homecoming Cycle [1978-1982]

According to Handke, W.A.T.V. is the fourth part of his "home-coming"

cycle [14]. The inception of the "homecoming period" -- a coming or

ROLOFF 8 W.A.T.V./P.S.
wanting to come home to many matters -- can be most directly found in

the novella The Left Handed Woman, 1975]. L.H.W.. announced a change,

a softening in tone and feeling and a more mythic disposition than the

harsh and upset works of the First Paris Period [1972-78] as,

certainly! -- The Moment of True Feeling [M.T.F.] and the

phenomenological self-observing notation of Handke's "naked ego" novel

Weight of the World [W.O.W.] can be described: except for that

"MOMENT" in M.T.F. where a different kind of loving feeling set in,

which would prove so productive. The "Anlage" was there all along

[15]. Yet that feeling first had to fumble its way equivocally out of

the word [all of Handke's love for so long had gone strictly into

writing] into the world. But let me not sentimentalize Handke just

because he started showing sentiment. "You don't miss much. You're

sly. You've given forethought to what's coming every time," Hans says

about "Gregor". And sister Sophy knows a few things about his "lidless

glance"!



Commonalities Among The Four "Home-Coming" Works

Perhaps the greatest among many deserving compliments that one can pay

[the post Paris I phase] Handke is this: [see 14] that if Nature were -

- as what it is generally understood to mean -- to disappear entirely

from the planet, it will be possible to rediscover it alive as nature

mort in certain stretches of his books beginning with A Slow

Homecoming. As Nova puts it in the final near-unending speech. "So

care patiently in the world finished off with artificial colors for

the revivifying colors of nature... But she [Nature] is the model and

provides the measure: which, however, must be taken each and every

day." One way of getting a grasp of Handke's modulating heart is to

note his changing attitudes to nature, from his nauseous disgust with

the merest wisp of hay in his early writing days to the celebration of

going threshing in The Essay on Tiredness.

In W.A.T.V. a sentiment-enriched understanding of nature indeed

provides the measure. Handke's nerve endings seem calibrated like the

hairs of the inner ear. He seems able to sense the wings of

ROLOFF 9 W.A.T.V./P.S.
butterflies trembling through walls of lead. Based on his tremulous

sensitivity, the Pacific Coast of the North American Continent would

have a more delicate quake advisor in the geologist Sorger of A Slow

Homecoming than any mechanical registrar. What counts is that Handke

has the ability to put what he senses and his intensities into words,

making his readers' equally sensitive, at least for a while. It is the

sensitivity of the ultra-wounded. But obviously not of someone

mortally so. And who has a quite magnificent instrument at his command

by the time he writes W.A.T.V.



THE CHILD

Among many matters that the four parts of the home-coming cycle share,

there is "the child" which Handke later regretted not putting into his

works sooner: it's first appearance (discounting his own appearance as

a child chiefly between the lines of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams [1971],

the book about his mother's life ) would seem to be Nonsense &

Happiness; or Weight of the World, mainly a nuisance there, and

treated petit-bourgeois sadistically to Handke's forever-after regret

as we find out in Child Story. In W.A.T.V. Hans's son uses his stick

to pound his way out of the maledictions that Gregor bequeaths on him.

The guiltily over-idealized child eventually provides the primordial

vantage point [the forever future], here as in Wings of Desire. That

child, however, has also always been one aspects of Handke's

phenomenological way of perceiving, and of his knowledge of writing in

the simplest of declarative sentences. [16]



PATHOS

Despite W.A.T.V.'s air of festiveness, Pathos pervades it entirely.

There is, first of all, the pathos of A.S.H., say of its long,

rhythmical and melancholic opening: "Sorger had already survived

several people to whom he had come close, but he felt no further

longing, except for those frequent bouts of a kind of selfless joy in

existence where an almost animalistic craving for salvation pressed

down on his eyelids" [17]. And this pathos, appropriately is given to

Gregor. But this kind of pathos does not weigh as heavily on W.A.T.V.

ROLOFF 10 W.A.T.V./P.S.
over-all: "For, there exists the name Victoria!" And because the play

was meant to be festive and loving.

Yet the sentence "It's becoming hard to walk on the earth"

signifies the heartsick pathos of the stepping forth and onwards, sore

and hot-footed on the cement and macadam -- while you calm yourself

and digest the food, fast and industrialized of the mind. -- The

occasional over-determined and multi-purposed explosions of fury would

seem to be the necessary opposite coin of the pathos. There is a

moment of extraordinary violence early on in A.S.H., too, as well as

the report of the actual acting out of violence in Child Story, of the

"bulldog" scene in The Lesson of St. Victoire. Let me not idyllicize

Handke or, overly, this play. "Heartfelt Irony," I think seeks to hold

the hounds of sardonicism at bay. It is the generous "as if" stance.

[See: 18]

Pathos is at its finest in Nova's supernal final speech. There

exists a relationship here between that reaching stammeringly for the

stars and the various components into which this pathos can be

dismembered, fractionally as it were. [19] A sense of the tragic, the

incommensurable, the Promethean -- if we add the mythic dimension --

and the Sysiphean; the will to overcome violence and the death

instinct, to bind it. The "immense tenderness" that Handke sought for

Nova's speech [see "Good Advice" anon] grows out of the "Inbrunst"

[20] that marked "Child Story." No tenderness without at least

knowledge of its opposite. Tenderness invariably skirts the edge of

the greatest danger. The pathos here is transfigured into an attempt

at the supernal. Very tough going it was to expunge the shop-worn

philosophical and religious connotations of the German vocabulary

here... for the author and his translator both. "The sense of man as

not only guilty but tragic," as Heinz Kohut used to put it. The

"Heartfelt Irony," which both distances and embraces the text as a

whole, would seem out of place in this speech, Nova's aria of the

incommensurable and possibly optimistic.



ROLOFF 11 W.A.T.V./P.S.
MEDIEVALISM

An overall perspective that informs at least three of these works

could be called Handke's 'medievalism', which, if you look half-way

closely, can not be confused with the medievalism as we find it in

certain German authors of the romantic period, say Novalis. Handke's

medievalism is a roughly ordered elaboration of the archaic

perspective: "We have always been the slaves. Inbetween we briefly

could be 'the workers.' Today we are the slaves again -- everyone

here, even the architects, even the scientists who test the ground,

even the state secretary who will soon dedicate the project. Not one

of us has a task worthy of a human being."

Yet Handke also has it "Don't look to the people -- nothing can be

seen there anymore," which pessimism does not necessarily contradict

Handke's original intention as expressed in D.G.D.B. "In the dramatic

poem the people must appear. And everything should work towards the

possibility of being able to say: 'Listen, I love you." But W.A.T.V.

also contains the fine observation: "Do the people not form of

themselves?"



AESTHETIC

"When I see the finished projects in our valleys I notice that they

lack something: something that was perhaps a certain bend in the roof

timbers -- not as outer decor, rather as a delicate line here in the

ribbing. I am in no way ashamed of these new buildings, am even a bit

proud that I was part of them, but each time I miss this one detail --

which would be the crowning. What's lacking is the rounding off. Yes,

the art is lacking." Some of the the "discussions," such as this one

about "Art", are scarcely sub-textual! And a very ancient discussion

it is, too. W.A.T.V. comes with its own aesthetic self-justification,

as Handke justifies each new version as he sings a different tune as

he moves on from one phase [see: 14] to the other, accommodates

himself, half-changing, continuing to love and be addicted to the act

of writing and what can be accomplished with it: [22]



ROLOFF 12 W.A.T.V./P.S.


As a Collage

Another way of regarding W.A.T.V. is as one of Handke's great

collages, the other's being the screenplay to Wings of Desire, The

Play of Questions, and most obviously of course, the latest play as of

this writing one has to keep saying, the textually over-powering and

visually profoundly hypnotizing The Hour When We Didn't Know Anything

About Each Other.

The collage method -- is this really as "modern" a method as it

seems to those with lack a sense of history?, a silly thing to carp

about in this "virtual" world I know -- is most easily discernible in

noting matters from the whole "Homecoming" cycle that are comprised

and emphasized and quoted in this text.[23] The efficiencies, the

playful pleasures of the serial principle, of which Handke availed

himself as early as his first poems and plays, are revived,

maintained, have matured, here and elsewhere, especially of course in

the sibilant diatribe against business. Yet those are only most

obvious instances. Sentiments, observations, formulations are joined,

shoe-horned into, and more or less appropriately [but also

interchangeably!] fitted and woven into [and not always via a narrow

concept of "in character"] into the individual speeches -- which fits

the over-all tone of the poem. [Yes, it is a "tone" poem, too!] And

this collaging is done with the strength of absolute virtuosity and

rightness. The collage-serial-principle, musically, rules the text as

a whole. Everything here is multiply determined, and serves multiple

purposes... EVERYTHING -- well just about -- cross-references within

the time-space of the play. Indeed, what a discovery and self-

discovery it can be to work on it!



AS AN ESSAY

By and large, Handke is the benign dictator in W.A.T.V. which can also

be read as an "essay", "entertained" the way an essay's suggestions

are entertainable, and which is also chock-a-block with grandfatherly

"opinions", with editorials -- there are discussions going on here! --

and, so, the drama can also be read as a "Handke essay," the way Thus

ROLOFF 13 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Spake Zarathustra used to be, line by line, sentence by sentence, in

a variety of ways

There is an entire school of reception in Germany which

uncomprehendingly confines W.A.T.V. & its successor play The Play of

Questions [P.O.Q.] within the category "Lese Drama" (a drama merely to

be read) where it isn't at all clear to what extent the current ear

still "hears" what it reads, or feels the undulations and beat of the

lines. A life-time spent in "Germanistics" is certainly capable of

extirpating all sense of poetry in a professor.



The Characters & Suggestions for Public Readings & Performances For

readings I had once thought of simply magnifying photos of the two

poetic sets, "Construction Site" & "Cemetery Wall" with its peace

cypress, onto a scrim; and to have the characters, if they were merely

reading the text, point out the details they were referring to in

their speeches -- or are they Sprechstimme arias? -- You could go

further and have these details leap out, be more intensely

illuminated, say, as scripted images, illustration of some lines in

the text for a dark age audience that cannot hear images. In Southern

California, for the set for Part II, I had wanted to indicate the

Spanish and Indian past of the region. I would do it differently in

the Northwest, differently in Mexico.

W.A.T.V. is a Thanksgiving play, an All Saints or Souls, Todos

Santos play, and that would seem to be a good time to try to have

rehearsed readings. But not to ignore its pagan aspect!

Olive groves mostly don't flourish north of the 35th parallel, I

don't think.

The Austrian premiere was held in a converted quarry in Salzburg.

I had always thought that an intimate setting might benefit the text

and obviate sets and visual props altogether.

One German production emphasized the business side of W.A.T.V.,

tried making the play into a whodunit! Wonders will not cease!



ROLOFF 14 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Obviously the Construction Site Mother & The Old Woman can be one

and the same actress. These two collapsible personages provide a

different kind of witnessing objectivity, and a more intimate p.o.v.

speaks here. Both figures are "care takers," "nurses," but celebrants

and mourners, too.

All the CHARACTERS, save Nova [though she claims to be "just me

here from another village" down the road] are manifestly and proudly

working class, and those are poet Gregor [and Handke's] origins, too.

And it is good not to ignore the natural narcissism of physical labor,

the sheer body egotism of it. Watch just about any construction site!

But, addressing Gregor, Sister Sophy, who works as a shop employee,

says: "You don't deserve the house and land, your work really only

serves yourself... Your so-called work can only be make-shift -- and

impudence: for sacred scriptures hath been written and sacred pictures

painted?" Not that this will keep Peter Handke from trying! And Gregor

replies, of course not sequentially, we're meant to make those

connections in the time-space of the play ourselves: "Back then he

[the artist] was the secret hero of the whole valley. Whenever I

passed his birthplace it became a moment of pride that such a fellow

was from the same community as we others. His statues stanched the

rush. His house looked so large and spacious to me. Yet it was the

usual peasant hovel, still lived in and worked in, one of a uniform,

even row of houses, and yet it was quieter than the others and looked

ennobled." There's some Lincolnesque "log-cabin-rolling" going on an

American might pun, not that there's need here to go into the

complicated and not necessarily pretty reasons for the stylization

when it pertains to Peter Handke, or a lot of other driven folks for

that matter who aren't even driven any more. Let me give him a break.

After all, the work will outlive him and indeed it can have its self-

described effect!

Hans's occupation in the construction trade is a persistent theme

in Handke's work; nay, a belief: "I am a worker. I was, I can say,

born as a worker. I don't want to be like him [Gregor]. I am not keen

to eat what he eats, to drink what he drinks. I am often asked whether

I envy him, and my reply is that I am satisfied to be a worker."

Handke's extolling of carpenter folk and their kind of tiredness in

the Essay on Tiredness and and of tiredness in D.G.D.B. is a more

detailed song of praise of that lean and precise but also playful and

dangerous craft. All this ought, of course, also can be understood

metaphorically I dare say.

Handke's dark, nihilistic streak, his persistent "amok running"

theme is here given powerful expression by Hans. The whole planet as

"the bomb!"

An image for the three workers, Albin, Anton & Ignatius that

flitted around my head for a while was of that A.T.T. now itself

ancient advertisement with one Caucasian, one Hispanic and one African

American worker. In the United States Northwest, where I am writing

these notes, I would also use an Asiatic face, and in the South West,

too.



ROLOFF 15 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Handke says all that needs saying about the Sing Song in his

"Sound Advice." Those who are familiar, say with the poetry of Dylan

Thomas, with the surrealist tradition and as it has entered the song-

writing of the modern troubadours of the blues and of folk rock will

have no difficulty with the sing-song chants -- as compared to those

folk who are virgin or whatever to this populist music and this

populist side of Handke. It's always good to look at his Essay on the

Jukebox and discover the reasons for it. [15]

Some readers may be happy to have an expansive and, for my money,

hilarious update on goalie and construction worker Bloch from The

Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, who reappears as Albin. Handke

is scarcely beyond quoting himself. These descriptions made for a

stretch of great and happy translating.

The starburst super-Nova, who is neither a Chevrolet model nor the

awful leaded Mexican gasoline of that name [but might have Dantesque

origins] is of course the most enigmatic of the lot! The most

oracular... and the most Nietzschean creature here except for Gregor

himself. Nova is also the playmaker, the m.c.! until she is replaced

by the child during her final aria, an aspect of the work that might

be easily over-looked, as the "spoil-sport" of The Play of Questions

cannot be so easily ignored -- In Hour the first four "pedestrians"

create their own play-place-space on the plaza.



ROLOFF 16 W.A.T.V./P.S.
The speaking abilities of those who read the text out loud... the

mnemic capacities of the actors if the play is performed. An

individual performer, such as myself on occasion, who can trust the

different syntax of each of the characters to obviate any need for

"impersonations," may find himself highly charged by such a marathon,

which can prove exhausting for the wrong kind of audience.

Nova's breathing becomes more and more difficult as she proceeds

to "climb the heights" of peace and self-abnegation and the

containment of violence, the seeking for ultimate meaning. Indeed,

Nova breathes dangerously high and thin air. Her creator is only too

aware of this when he indicates those halting PAUSES.

Sophy's wish for independence is a modest and affectionate casting

of an unspeakable "discussion," but Handke uses it to undercut his own

grandfatherly, then, in the early 80s, "touchingly" [?] reactionary

dictatorial side, his bond to the only real male model of his youth,

and for his cussing, too, it would appear.

Masks... leaf masks... Greek masks...African masks... no end of

masks. Yes, those masks, where during every walk through the deciduous

forests the ancestors peek out, form themselves, a humanist

Shamanistic notion that! [25]



On Translating W.A.T.V.

This translation, as circumstances would have it, became A TRANSLATION

VERY MUCH FOR VOICE: at least to be spoken, if not shouted out loud, a

free-ing of the constraints of the diaphragm is what was involved, a

cleansing of the whole voice box. Very much done from the solar

plexus; but also with a keen, if not burning mind. But I am getting

ahead of myself, and am helter-skeltering rhapsodically.

With reference to the translation, and by way of earlier mention

of syntax, I first want to emphasize the "anaclitic" [anschmiegsame]

ability of a translator, the necessary empathy; not just the

translator's oral & digestive or possibly competitive potential! -- As

a matter of fact: syntax came to "rule" the overall process of

translation of each of the speeches, no figuring this out, you could

ROLOFF 17 W.A.T.V./P.S.
go with it, it absorbed me; yes, in the matter of letting the

individual syntax of each of the characters manifest itself I was a

passive vehicle who opened himself up to the original syntax and

allowed it to exert itself through me while I refashioned it

emphatically into the English syntax through the speaking and shouting

process.

But this becalming syntax, when it is calming, and the -- I hope --

long rhythms of American speech and of Whitman, to the extent that

they exist here to accommodate Handke's wish for risings and fallings

["Hebungen und Senkungen"] -- stand in this translation in a tense

relationship to its compact, I hope terse, "voiced" aspect and

"cutting" as Handke at some point felt it was and in the "good sense";

and perhaps this tension accommodates the play's sense of "The living

are the eternally driven!" -- By which I don't mean winging it on the

well-paved interstates of this world as I had occasion to write

Ezraishly to our multi-talented publisher, Donald Daviau. And the

punctuation in the translation is more interested in indicating pauses

and rhythm for the speakers, you either notice that or you don't, than

in living up to some copy editor's prosaic dream.

Rhythms are meant to rule these lines, something close to the free

verse iamb; that and the compoundednesses of a very Anglo-Saxon nature

as I have come to appreciate them in Gerald Manley Hopkins' verbal

dance: "Who has my wound searing his heart/ is balmed even by tree-

leaf at eye level... Walking under sun-joy/ we intake inmost

bitterness." The occasional moment of subterranean Shakespearean

grandeur, of rhetoric: "They have masks not faces, their eyes are

nothing but darkened pupils, impenetrable and distended by sadness as

once upon the eyes of kings as they broke camp for realm of death, and

your brother, walking in front, waves the black flag." But also of

'pidgin' ["and mostly he don't want to know no one."] and of 'common,'

'plain' American speech, street-language, and lingo from the

construction trades. And there were times I restrained myself!

"Sharp" "natural" "high" "bitter" "wildly melancholy," and

ROLOFF 18 W.A.T.V./P.S.
"immensely tender" [for Nova's speech at the end]: those were the

levels which, altogether, resulted in that ONE [Credence Clearwater

Revival [C.C.R.] sound" was how Handke described what he was after,

also in English. And for me, translating into American is translating

into the [to me] available riches of the Anglo-American tradition in

the world-widest sense of that word of my acquaintance and

capabilities, especially in as evocative and rich and elicitive an

instance such as this. Yes, why not the occasional neologism if it

works; though Handke, except for the rare compound, prides himself on

making do with what has been passed on; much of which, of course, he

has redeemed, cleansed. For whatever difference it makes and to whom?

Well, certainly to the ghosts of Fenelossa and old Ezra, whose

"ethics" were at least those of language. -- And what Handke calls the

"laconic" quality that inheres his work despite all "its excesses" --

it's exorbitance I would say -- I pray it comes across tersely here.

Thought did have to be given to the weight of certain words of

Latin origin. A few more were excised in galleys, they come too

easily! They introduce the wrong kind of "familiarity" to no end of

programmed dreck and make it go down too smoothly.

Spending the better part of the past several years in a real

village, walking its roads ankle-deep in velvety mucho pulvo; having,

long before, and fruitfully so I think, slowed myself down to walk on

village time -- translating W.A.T.V. under those in every respect

calmer circumstances than was done in the N.Y. of the early 80s: who

knows how the translation would have turned out? For this is the once

that the circumstances under which the work was done, especially the

unloosenings under psychoanalysis, strongly influenced a translation

of mine.



The Translation TASK

Some time in summer of 1981 Peter Handke wrote that he was sending a

new play to be translated. It was his first play in nearly ten years

and I was, of course, immediately intrigued -- I am by anything of

Handke's. I recall hungering for the text.



ROLOFF 19 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Possibly seeking to bring the play -- dramatic poem -- closer to

my world and heart, Handke, in announcing it, mentioned that it was an

T.S. Eliotish text, which however well-intentioned intimation did not

set this heart on fire: An Eliotish play, of whatever kind, seemed not

the fulfillment of the promise of the "more emotional" play made after

Ride Across Lake Constance [R.A.L.C.] and They Are Dying Out

[T.A.D.O. Nor would anything along Eliotish lines, I did not think,

seem to consist entirely of haikus; for that was what my reading of

Handke's Geschichte des Bleistift (which is so informative on the

thought that Handke gives to writing) led me to believe might be what

was "cooking" in Salzburg [26]: Eliot's gnomic allusiveness, his

mysteries? That kind of High Church Catholicism? Though with Handke's

versatility as collage artist... Anyhow, I was about to be surprised,

because there is a fruitful way of regarding W.A.T.V. also from the

haiku perspective, and we're not talking counting syllables here;

maybe pebbles into the pond. But the only time I thought of Eliot [via

Pound's, the most clearly grained ear in American poetry] was when I

found the line "The supernal is not to be expected."

However one thing then did puzzle me: Handke's writing, at one

point, that "despite the piece's excesses he had known what he was

doing every step of the way": nothing of his I had read or translated

to date [or have since] had given me reason to suspect that such

excess was due to some lack of conscious control. [27]

Once I had started my work I wrote Handke how agreeable I found

the going, and he responded [Fall 1981] "That the piece does you good

and that Carl Weber [the director of three Handke premiere's in the

U.S., but not so far of W.A.T.V.] [28] likes it too, that does me

good. You can ask me things if you don't know how to proceed during

the translation. Perhaps I won't be able to explain but I'll be able

to describe [umschreiben], tell stories; some sentences oracle of

course, and not as a joke either, they come from the depths (or simply

out of the human)..."

The deeper I got into the text the more I realized how right I had

been when I wrote Handke that W.A.T.V. would challenge me to the

utmost, as no text of his -- challenging as each had been in its own

ROLOFF 20 W.A.T.V./P.S.
rewarding way -- had been so far, and as I had been challenged in

that field only once or twice before. [29]

At moments translating W.A.T.V. seemed insuperable, and

ultimately, required a near unending number of onslaughts, and the

author was both helpful and more than unusually interested in seeing

to it that the work would turn out well. [30]

That extra little extra, that additional something, that

Romanesque twist in the roof timbers (that I mentioned in the context

of aesthetics and medievalism) can be found in just about each German

sentence here, not only as the STRONG mot juste, but in the more than

full completion of nearly each and every sentence; can be discovered

in the syntax throughout, too. As noticeable as this becomes, through

differentiation from most works you read in German these days, there

are moments when Handke's ultra-perfectionism smacks of his being the

pain-in-the-behind A+ student; and, generally, that extra little twist

to each sentence was not something I wanted to duplicate as

insistently in American -- perhaps because I am not as unhappy with

the strengths of plain direct American speech ["He looks as though he

doesn't get it."] and fail to see American in need of the kind of

redemption and re-invigorating that Handke so justly introduces here

into the "old." Or seeking to accomplish this would have come across

as too self-conscious; or just can't be done in American, or I just

can't, and I stuck to Handke's advice to "make it simpler in the

translation." -- Just about every German sentence has an added gold

grain: The antique here is made to shine in a way it never did at any

time before I expect; but we will never know, can only guess by

looking, say, at the welcome accorded what was called modernism early

this century! -- Question is whether some of the linguistic standbys

of German romanticism have been redeemed in W.A.T.V. or are even

redeemable -- a matter of no concern to the American reader.

Handke's responses to the first several drafts was to the effect

that [31]... but, since these letters afford such fine insights into

his intentions and to an appreciation & understanding of the dramatic

poem, let me quote the pertinent passages in their entirety.





ROLOFF 21 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Sound Advice

Feb 20/ 82

"I'll be brief. By and large you are on the right track, that's for

sure. In some respects you are on smaller wrong tracks [32]... The

piece has no jargon, verbal jokes... at a few spots you lose the

illusion of the merry [Heitere], of matter of factness, of

festiveness. The whole piece should have ONE language, even-handed,

regular, like a song. A friend wrote years ago about the music of

Credence Clearwater Revival [C.C.R. hereafter]: "They sing as one

voice." That is what W.A.T.V. is like; not one sentence should be a

witty aside. "Sharp" "natural", "high" "bitter" "wildly melancholy,"

"immensely tender": those were the levels which altogether resulted in

that ONE sound. [The immensely tender" is for Nova's speech.]

Technical, psychological, theological philosophical vocabulary is out

of place... Perhaps you should stick to the fact that many sentences

ought to be as clear and as mysterious as oracular sayings: much in

the text, regarded this way, is at least ambiguous; e.g. "das

uebernaturliche ist nicht zu erwarten;" or :"die Kuenstler bilden das

Volk"... At the same time, nothing should be mystified: you must know

what to do with each and every sentence, and it has to come out of

your flesh.

"The songs in Part One in many ways are formed after those of

C.C.R. and even quote a few lines: "run through the jungle" "looking

through the back door;" "somewhere I lost the connection" (Lodi) etc.

etc. Give a close listen to these songs; to the text and the music,

the wild, simple, sonorous, serious, lamenting is precisely the

original of the songs of W.A.T.V.; and not only of the songs, but also

of the alternating discourse [the highest form of drama Goethe called

it, distinguishing it from dialogue]... Even before the curtain opens,

when the brother [Gregor] starts up: "My brother wrote me a letter."

it roars softly of the ballad "she wrote me a letter"...[also from a

Credence song]. Incidentally, none of the rhymes are meant to be

humorous: rather, the weight should be on the burdening irony, the

irony with which dangers, pain, catastrophes that have been withstood

are told... And: Bob Dylan plays a small role in the subterranean

ROLOFF 22 W.A.T.V./P.S.
homesickness chorus...Subterranean Homesickness Blues...

The text ought never be over-formulated, no finesse that might

bring the reader up short. That still happens too frequently. You'll

know it yourself. Realize that all of this was written from the

deepest soul and watched over by a spirit which double-checked itself

clearly, at least during the writing; and that every "saying" comes

from the material, not out of my private sphere but also out of your,

etc. It is a materialistic piece, but the material, the stuff comes

from a human being who, writingly testifies [bekennt] to it, who has

[33] opened himself up (as wide as was possible for him) and who

vaulted up [aufgewschungen] to something or took wing [befluegelt]...

All that, at first glance, or as a whole, or in some sentences, may

seem light-headed [leichtsinning], or cloudy, but that is not the

case, and it isn't right either that you feel the piece touches you

because part of your childhood was spent in Catholic South Germany. It

is an objective piece, but as I said, most things are already right.

Don't be afraid to be sharper and simpler than the German, it should

not become unambiguous..."



July 8/82

"Briefly: the prose sections are good [letter narrative, etc.]; the

lyrical sections seem to me not that good. Also when the language --

one main trait of the piece -- becomes oracular -- mystifications

[geheimnistuerisches] is not what I have in mind. I don't think the

following examples really hit the spot: 'don't be the main character,'

seek out the fight, no thoughts in back of your mind," [which for

better of worse have become "Don't be the top dog. Seek out the face-

off. Have no thoughts in back of your mind".] this whole very

important speech of Nova's becomes pompous in your hand

[besserwisserisch, geheimnistuerisch] That is the problem: the piece

must really be rendered sentence by sentence; the German sentences

must become a quiet weight for you, and only then can you carry this

weight into the English linguistic image; that very often is not the

case in your translation; and only that could be called translating.

Also you have not recognized that the prose sections often become

rhythmical too, with risings and falling [Hebungen und Senkungen] as

ROLOFF 23 W.A.T.V./P.S.
in free verse. What is lacking, what carries the discourse is the

grace [Anmut]. Do you understand what I mean?... I can see your

difficulties, but can't help you in any other way than this. Primarily

what is missing is the laconic quality which my writing, with all its

excesses, possesses."

#

A tall order it looks like even now, [34] though at the time -- I was

pushing into unknown territory, Handke's was setting the compass rose

as well as someone who, meanwhile, knew the task of translating. [35]

Not that I could keep each piece of advice, except the "sentence by

sentence," in mechanical mind at any one time: thence lay madness! Yet

if I think about the various requirements, who knows whether I met

them altogether and found a good enough solution to each and every

one. Of course not! How nice to finally have galleys of my own and

design the book, too; and fine-tune a little here and there.



Translating in the Analytic Situation

That was in Summer of 1982 and, by and large, I let the text rest

until late that fall -- also: events intervened that kept me from it

until it was the only thing I wanted to turn to. And "circumstances"

and analysis produced a state of mind where P.A.d.R. announced at one

session that all defenses were down... wide open on the table. One had

known how to open himself as "wide as possible", the other had

happened into the same state. [36]

There came the time... the intercession, vacation from analysis,

and for once I had the loft and two weeks entirely to myself. The trek

was becoming lonelier. Part of me felt that nothing would daunt me, as

long as I could push on.

One way of solving the "sentence by sentence," each sentence

anchored by its own image problem, was to concretize it for myself by

associating an experience to it, a personal, a read or seen experience

such as Handke's own reference to Bresson's ///// in the lines: "One

evening I watched on television the story of a teenage girl who was

shunned by her village as a rape victim and who finally killed

herself... Finally, though, she succeeded, she plopped into the water

ROLOFF 24 W.A.T.V./P.S.
and went down at once, and with the organ music which set in then I

was seized by a crying fit."

For example, for the "most pathetic" I was just then able to

associate a current re-experience of the aboriginal childhood trauma --

and not "acting out" a momentary cure but working on this text, it

helped. And it is amazing under what conditions, if left undistracted,

it is possible to work. Another fairly recent experience that came out

of my flesh was: "Have your forgotten my frightfully gentle replies to

the bosses and the bosses' assistants tyranny which echoed even out

into the street, my eyes round with fear at the cash register's daily

take?"

Also, I had made some real acquaintance with the "machine of

evil." I had come to know the extent to which "the doctors didn't

stick to us." The brilliant and thoroughly empathic and sensitive P.A.

d. R. erred in playing "Laius in the Armchair," and both of us were

sorrier for it! And our "rush to judgement" proved a dearth of

imagination, which in that situation as in every other, is the primary

prerequisite, did so to the point of ultimately useful but certainly

premature and adventurous severance.

Indeed I came to fit an association, a story, an unloosened

feeling and experience to each sentence and thus found the image for

it. [37]

And I certainly was close enough in analysis at that point to have

no problem "Turning to my dead... It is them I address in the dark,

and they appear, in the eye of the cat, in the branch brushing the

window in the nightwind, [the creaking of the wood of the ancient

barque loft] even in the humming of the icebox... My dead are not

ghosts of the night -- they are part of the brightest daylight, and I

touch them not when I sleep but when I rest. They are with me! Yes,

sometimes I feel seen by them, in friendliness." This access to the

imagoes being another theme which is resurrected in the The Essay on

the Jukebox.

You will know yourself what experiences you can bring to each of

these lines and which emotions and images and stories associate with

those experiences. It is good to realize that with mutual starting

ROLOFF 25 W.A.T.V./P.S.
points in the subjective, in experience and fantasy, that such

subjectivities have some way of reaching each other through agreed on

objectivities.

The horse cure was taking, snow accumulated on my head cooling the

long Indian summer's burning, the Northwest sire from Fairbanks was

shaking and swaying the timber, the pipes burst, the x-mas goose was

canceled. My now access to my now no longer repressed feelings to each

of these observed experiences entered the translation of each

sentence, lent it "weight", anchored and directed it, helped focus my

voice and dredge up the appropriate words as I went feeling over my

mystic writing pad for them.

I was becoming freer and more decisive and daring. I realized I

was entering an area of re-invention when I translated the

untranslatable German "erschutterbar" in Nova's enigmatic first major

speech, as "Tremble, quake, shatter, heal." Still, this Nova section,

[and the very end of Nova's final aria] were weakest until now, and

they are the only ones who have been put through the wringer once

again. Also, there were a few changes from galleys which I did not see

until I finally received the completed book.

For a while I felt I was oracling, too, albeit in highly

formalized, controlled linguistic setting, which grandiosity has a

certain humor even if you have it in you. Yet I think such a state of

oracling is quite rare and the accompanying intensity is not to be

recommended for every-day living, "translating another's wounds" as

Handke describes a translator's task in The Afternoon of a Writer;

This aspect of translating an idealizable "projection screen text," a

transitional object if ever there was one, during the height, or if

you wish tumultuous and intense depths of psychoanalysis meant --

since Handke had written, explaining himself, that he had written the

text in something of an oracular state -- that I then completed my

work, humming, sussuring, mouthing, talking, speaking, shouting and

pounding the text or sections of it over and over for about two weeks.

And this straightened out the syntax. Not that intensity itself is a

guarantee, except perhaps during hallucinatory wish fulfillment!

Anyhow, no foolproof prescriptions exist.





ROLOFF 26 W.A.T.V./P.S.
AFTERMATH

Over the years W.A.T.V. became a kind of test, a vibe or wave length

test you might call it, as Kaspar had been once for entirely different

reasons, for sorting the the blessed from those less so. W.A.T.V.,

too, is one of these great divide works, as the entire Home Coming

Cycle is; and thus W.A.T.V. also became a shield against too close

involvement with... the unblessed. It has become my "heart test" as it

were. This godsend it seemed at the time, however, then for many years

became an Albatross, a major fixation, sentences from it keep rumbling

around my head even now, and one sentence of it finds its way into

just about each and every chain of associations; and the text is, or

has become so obsessively multi-leveled for me in the meanwhile that I

can associate sentences of it for just about each and every moment in

life, or rather: sentences from it pop into my mind, and for all I

know I may recite it on my deathbed.

Psychoanalytically the most insightful observations Handke made

about the translation [I mean: he was so happy that at one point he

"gave it to me" and it took him a few letters to remember that without

him there would have been no translation! -- and I find him a better

judge of translations of his own work than anyone else [38]-- was that

the English text was "cutting in the good sense". Indeed: the last two

weeks of intense reading and shouting and breathing it out over and

over had "bound" a lot of aggression that had become unloosed during

the deep, unbinding regression of analysis to something near re-birth,

aggressions which were not in every instance so transformed into

something cuttingly good... as I cut through the crowds during those

days of narcissistic rage. [39]

Translating W.A.T.V. I also came under the distinct impression

that there is little that Handke, at least at that time, could not

draw on, including the deepest connections of psychology [say, as the

Goethe of Elective Affinities, so clearly knew] -- but, then, W.A.T.V.

is the kind of lodestone that can draw everything out of a translator

into itself; and the suspicion of the author 'knowing everything', if

only with heartfelt irony, might just mean that 'everything' I 'knew',

ROLOFF 27 W.A.T.V./P.S.
however articulable, including what "reason" I felt I possessed, is

absorbed by this work; and that, ultimately, the desubstantialized

husk of a translator imputes "everything," his whole self, including

hard-earned tattoos and what "heart" he has left, and his entire

vocabulary [which is the sort of silage that too needs replenishing

during an act of translation] to the author, which Handke might use as

proof of the "rational" perception of the "godly shudder" as sentences

of his forever after "dance their way" into every association for

years and years to come. "My dead are not ghosts of the night, they

are part of the brightest day-light..." as which formalist

necrophiliac "angels" they re-appear in Wings of Desire.[40]

This of course has very little to do with naturalism, and

everything with a very grand metaphysical but extraordinarily

concretely anchored humanist poetry. Which it is worth making yourself

a fool over. -- And so, it is possible, but not one iota safer it

turns out, to fall in love with and and to fight, and if you have

fighting dirty in you also to fight dirty, for a translation as much

as a beautiful woman![41]



ROLOFF 28 W.A.T.V./P.S.


"The castle looks odd: it tapers off sharply towards the top and on a

full moon belongs to the high pyramid mountain in back, as its small

clone in the village region. And he built his castle solely for this

image."



ROLOFF 29 W.A.T.V./P.S.
NOTES

1] The mansions of existentialism would seem to extend from Kaspar's

[1968] disgust with language and being, via the personal horrors of

the Paris Period, to the mythic existentialism of the Homecoming

period; the representative works of the latter two periods being the

near suicidal A Moment of True Feeling [1974] and A Slow Homecoming

[1979].



2] By alternating discourse Handke means the augmenting back and forth

of the long speeches that allow the individual personae to address

each other and to display themselves and to describe each other in

their complexity, and to argue out their positions ["Here I stand --

everyone is in the right."]; which certainly is something very

different from the customary dialogue which I am hard put to imagine

how it might accomplish what is desired here.



3] Handke once made one change in the galleys for T.A.D.O. pointing

out, far too apologetically, that he had been a little distracted. He

changed a briefly sentimental section back into his then still more

customary derisiveness -- at about the time he was emotionally

equivocating between these polarities.



4] These dissonances within its overall melodiousness probably did

little more -- did they?-- than to get the comfortable Salzburg

festival guests to hiccup a few times in their riding school quarry;

where Vim Wenders, so I hear, directed the German language premiere,

so deferentially, in 1982. "You are neither ominous nor monstrous, but

ineffable and inexhaustible," Nova announces in W.A.T.V. -- where the

word evil occurs with wicked frequency! -- As does the word

"business." But so does the word "heart"! -- Not that the true selves

of the monsters whom W.A.T.V. addresses will be flattered into a sea-

change that easily! My own solution would be the "love of

understanding", now if that could go deep & be married to the "good

self!" Wouldn't that be something!



00] [how much "warmer" already the Robbe-Grillet novel Der Hausierer

[1968] than any novel by the French writer from whom Handke learned so

much!]. A lyrical warmth announces itself in moments of the poems in

Nonsense & Happiness [N.& H.] from the early mid-70s



ROLOFF 30 W.A.T.V./P.S.
15] A.S.H., Handke's Alaska book of course did not include every sight

that the sight collector had found there. Some of these grand and

dread experiences are shoe-horned into what Hans and the three

workers, the Lumpazi Vagabundi [as players they are the clowns, they

have the best parts!] say about each other, and what is fitted into

their great singsong chants [23]. Another touch of Alaska is in the

the Essay on the Jukebox, where I am astonished to discover that --

were it not for a certain, self-described, preternatural hesitancy on

his part -- we nearly lost our romantic author AND HIS CRAFT! --

dancing his once to a jukebox tune, with an Eskimo maiden, in a low-

down Anchorage bar. -- With each site visited during his many travels

Handke accumulates "leftovers" for which, somewhere down the line, he

will find a place in another book! A kind of recherche du temps perdu

on the transwordly run as the rabbit fur picks up brambles for yet

further fruitful investigation sometime down the line.





The direction "heartfelt irony" transforms W.A.T.V. into a "warm"

transitional "as if" object! Handke endorses the defensive nature of

the "as if state"! Imagination itself becomes the transitional object;

the step from there to writing is but the short and long of talent and

ambition, and to the concretization in the form of a book, which if

you criticize it becomes as sensitive . Not that the play is lacking

a DIDACTIC aspect.



D] "Walking, don't overlook the thresholds from one realm to the next:

the wind, from the other space, arises when you see the thresholds,

and the circling ravens are not birds of misfortune but bring you

heroes your food." There of course are other thresholds as the future

"tresholdler" Loser was to find out in Across. Among the most

productive thresholds are those between the various attachments as

these unfold and unloose "tuggingly" in the analytic situation", and

the threshold between the "yes" and the "no." W.A.T.V. can be said,

overall and specifically, to straddle, many of these "thresholds",

they are the source of its "openness" and of its "ambiguities."



ROLOFF 31 W.A.T.V./P.S.
5] I could again play in my sandbox with a matured version of Handke's

serial procedures with which I had made first acquaintance in the

early plays -- Self-Accusation, Public Insult etc. and Innerworld of

the Outerworld of the Innerworld.



6] Nor is this treatment, this versatility with syntax, unique to

Handke's dramatic efforts: the becalmed "whirling" of the Essay on the

Successful Day affect the reader who is sensitive to these matters in

a "timely" fashion, too. The novel The Repetition induces as slow and

attentive a way of reading as walking a country road: "The God of

Slowness..." But Handke also knows how to make the beat leap

arrhythmically like the heart beat with which life was jump-started:

"So that my heart stands still again as what was then not called not-

life but first gave measure to being-live."



The "response" section in Part IV obviously derives from Church

practices, yet it has a nice "heathenish" quality to it here, both

derisive and melancholy.



7] This is the best of Handke's anti-Austrian tirades in the

competition among Austrian writers for anti-Austrian tirades which

seems prophetically appropriate to current United States prison

policy: The fifty united concentration camps of North America it will

be known as shortly.



8] The Nietzche quote, in its entirety, reads: "This is no fanatic

speaking here, no one is 'preaching', no demand for belief is being

exacted: drop by drop the words falls out of an infinite realm of

light and joy -- tender and slow is the pace of these speeches, and of

a kind that reaches only the most select of the select; it is an

incomparable privilege to be listening to them."



With The Hour That We Didn't Know Each Other Handke turned the tables

on his audience's gnattish impatience with the extended periods of

W.A.T.V. [and of The Repetition, The Play of Questions and the novel

Absence]. He forced his audience's picayune attention span to pay a

more dizzying and profound kind of attention than they know from the

usual visual media of their acquaintance which merely duplicate and

distract them from the distraction that is their life. This different

ROLOFF 32 W.A.T.V./P.S.
kind of attention, -- it teaches you to see all over, possibly even

to the abyss of the "system unconscious" -- of course, also repays

W.A.T.V.: a good outfitter, a good "Bobcat" his life spent in-country,

eyes trained on the terrain, say for unbroken arrowheads where an

amateur only finds shards. Hour gradually mesmerizes with the

profundity of the exchange of super-ego's that characterizes the folie

a deux of believing hypnotists and their believing subjects. "The

Joyous Eye" could be its subtitle.



9] Anthropologically, this is not a complete family; nor within the

internal qualities of aunts and uncles cousins nephews and

grandparents does it have the extension and differentiation of psychic

qualities that an extended clan affords. It is fairly nuclear,

postwar.



10] Nova's opening poem "Man from overseas, spectator mask over your

cheeks. You had no ear for the surge of the subterranean homesickness

dirge. Blind to the drops of blood in the snow, wanderer without

shadow. Hand among hands on bus straps you stand. Northsoutheastwest

sire, but now I am getting mired," establishes the mythic mood lens

through which not only Gregor's prodigal Odysseys-like return [the

return of the eternal stranger] but the dramatic poem in its entirety

asks to be experienced. "What is a drama today? That there are neither

a people nor a home. Yet, ultimately, you have no choice but to love

your own land and your own people, at least the idea of them -- but

that is something I only learned in the course of the years in foreign

countries," is how Handke put it in D.G.D.B. Reading W.A.T.V. one also

comes under the impression that Handke is only too well aware of the

lack of welcome granted his alter ego Gregor. "Right now the word

making the village rounds is: That guy is back."



11] THEATRICAL BACKGROUND: Though W.A.T.V. apparently was meant as the

successor play to Hoffmannsthal's by now venerable Salzburg Jedermann,

it is really an "every human" play in the widest possible

ROLOFF 33 W.A.T.V./P.S.
sense of the word. There is awfully little left of the old "everyman"

plays here unless references such as the Old Woman's to once "money

bags" Gregor be it. Within the Austrian tradition I am at something of

a loss, or too ignorant,to find some precedent for a lyrical narrative

drama as luminous and ambitious as W.A.T.V.



von Horvarth [need to look at Handke's H. essay].... - Dramatically,

W.A.T.V. bears no relation to those traditions at least that I know

of...



It is good to keep in mind Handke's original liking of Lessing's

Nathan the Wise, that high-point of the enlightenment gospel of

tolerance; and W.A.T.V.'s spiritual affinity to Goethe's Iphegenia,

another peace play.



AS AN ESSAY

By and large, Handke is the benign dictator in W.A.T.V. which can also

be read as an "essay", "entertained" the way an essay's suggestions

are entertainable, the way Thus Spake Zarathustra used to be, line by

line, sentence by sentence, in a variety of ways; and W.A.T.V. is

also chock-a-block with grandfatherly "opinions", with editorials --

there are discussions going on here! And so it is perhaps not too

surprising that there is an entire school of reception in Germany

which uncomprehendingly confines W.A.T.V. & its successor play The

Play of Questions [P.O.Q.] within the category "Lese Drama" (a drama

merely to be read) where it isn't at all clear to what extent the

current ear still "hears" what it reads, or feels the undulations and

beat of the lines. A life-time spent in "Germanistics" is certainly

capable of extirpating all sense of poetry in a professor.



12] Yes, the loved but ultimately hated classics. The resurrection of

those ghosts have made life difficult for Handke for decades now.





ROLOFF 34 W.A.T.V./P.S.
13] Overall, its form is musical. But I have also read one account of

the play which calls Nova's final long speech a "coup de theatre" --

that aria is a kind of summary coda. Handke is a romantic, and within

the spectrum of romanticism, his hope too, after all, is for the text

to approximate music. The transposition of the genre's music/lyric is

not that unusual, but the transvaluation that is added through

integration of the painterly transposes certain works into an

altogether other dimension.



14] Before I touch on the four parts of the The Homecoming Cycle [1978-

1982], how they relate, and specifically to W.A.T.V., and before I

dwell on Walk About the Villages in some detail, and how W.A.T.V.

relates to what I call Handke's "time-plays, and before I launch into

the saga of this translation, I need to backtrack a little.

It ought to be kept in mind that Handke's work divides into

something like five PHASES, each phase generally lasting something

like seven years. Indeed, it is possible to reduce a literary career

to an entry of this 'phasic' kind! It was done to Goethe, and my

footnote does it to the closest model that the German language has had

to offer in that league for some time. In this instance the phases are

chiefly tied to places, not to loved, influential women, which is also

interesting.

Handke's conceptual 'avant garde' period 1965-72 [Die Hornissen,

Kaspar, Der Hausierer, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, The

Ride Across Lake Constance etc. -- the transitional work to a somewhat

more traditional narrative being Short Letter Long Farewell -- is

succeeded by the equivocal and emotional and far more directly

personal works of the Paris Period [1971-77] A Sorrow beyond Dreams, A

Moment of True Feeling; The Weight of the World, Nonsense & Happiness,

which period itself is succeeded by The Homecoming Cycle and Handke's

establishment of himself in Salzburg if nothing less at least as the

would-be high priest of Austrian literature -- the transitional work,

in this instance, is The Left Handed Woman [L.H.W./1975].



ROLOFF 35 W.A.T.V./P.S.
The gradual downward spiral from the Salzburg high point, W.A.T.V.

& the transfigured retelling of Handke's youth The Repetition [1984]

[which can be regarded as the second part of the third phase, is

already intersected by Across [1983]. This novel gives you the idea

that living in such high quarters does not sit well with a protagonist

who is now called Loser [only after the mountain?] and who is once

again ready to run amok like many other Handke protagonists -- and

which protagonist "crashes" and spits out the crash with the writing

of The Afternoon of a Writer [1986].

Afternoon marks the inception of Phase Four, of the period of

apparently fairly homeless hithering and dithering which aimless and

homeless wandering, however, in no way diminished the quality of the

work: The Play of Questions, or Journey into the Sonorous Land [1985];

the wondrous novel as screenplay as novel, fairy tale as description

of a film Absence [1987]; the brief pieces, some of them of the

traveling kind, in For Thucidedes [1988], the two "assaying"

narratives On Tiredness [1989] & On the Jukebox [1990].

The becalmed vortex of An Essay On the Successful Day [1991] and

the ballet-play without words [But what a text!] The Hour That We

Didn't Know Anything About Each Other [1992] possibly announce the

inception of Phase Five when the flaneur of being has ceased to wander

the planet and is pretty well resettled on the outskirts of Paris. Any

conclusion in that direction awaits our reading of the 1000 plus page

novel Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht [1994].

Continuing to backtrack and "place," I need to sketch, most

sketchily, THE HOMECOMING CYCLE [1979-1981].

According to Handke, W.A.T.V. is the fourth part of his "home-

coming" cycle which, you will recall, consists of the Alaskan "Sorger"

novel A Slow Homecoming [A.S.H.]; the "mixed" essay The Lesson of

Saint Victoire [L.O.S.V.], and of Child Story [C.S.], the account of

Handke's relationship with his daughter, Amina. W.A.T.V. is the

culmination of that particular stretch in Handke's career as a writer;

it's highpoint.



ROLOFF 36 W.A.T.V./P.S.
An unusual cycle, an oddly angled quartet if ever there was one.

As a cycle within a phase perhaps a little less unlikely, and not that

unlikely within the manner in which Handke conducts his "phases." But

this is not the Alexandria Quartet, or something like the Joseph

Trilogy, as a cycle it's more what a French person of letters might

conceive of, Gide for example; nor is it the Yoknapatawkwa oeuvre --

though the latter's ambition may have been transposed onto Handke's

long-term endeavor to give a by no means unincidental, though somewhat

purged, account of the history of his soul during its time on earth.

One question I will only pose here: how do these four parts

relate? Like some kind of "mobile" for sure! The surveyor has not room

and time at the moment to narrate the relationships of the space and

angles of the constellation. Some fine scholarly work, meanwhile, has

been done along those line, which I can not recapitulate here.

But by entering each new phase, Handke was losing the audience

from the previous phases. And who, after all, has the luxury to

exclusively watch the progress of Handke's work, though in fact, it is

one of the more interesting things to have done over the past 30

years.



Approaches

Just as the phases change, there are a variety of fruitful approaches

to what is beginning to look more and more like one of the most

dazzling, deeply formal, performances in a long time! One approach

would be to discern the profusion of techniques and endeavors that an

invariably verbally activist author has found to kineaesthetically

affect and involve his readers since his earliest days, but which

richness in technique, as different as the phases, has never really

ceased. -- As early as the Paris Period Handke wrote that "he felt he

was capable of doing anything with words," which points to his

virtuoso capacities, which he cannot say to have misused. Peter

Handke, with occasional tendencies in that direction, is no Liszt. The

fact that Handke then did not altogether succeed in some of these

ROLOFF 37 W.A.T.V./P.S.
works is another matter; in some, such as Absence, more frequently in

the plays than in the novels, he did succeed entirely on his own and

on the necessary formal terms. Which is where the rub lies with this

kind of work. You don't get lucky, as with a book like Absence, or

plays like W.A.T.V. or Hour all that often in your life! What if there

were no film industry! The transposition of genres! Not to mention

"transposed heads." Again, this is not the place to enumerate the

wealth of Handke's repertoire and the extent to which he accommodates

itself to turbulent times; keeps from getting bored; or how the

purposes for writing and the aesthetics change over the course of a

thirty year period. Perhaps Handke's main contribution will be the

redemption of the language, the leaving of a granary rich in literary

possibilities. Who could ask for more? The permanently starved will

for sure.





ROLOFF 38 W.A.T.V./P.S.
16] Handke describes his phenomenological method in the following

manner: "He experiences everything he encounters as he goes along as

part of the narrative; whatever he takes in is promptly narrated

inside him; moments in the present take place in the narrative past,

and not as in dramas but, without any fuss, as mere assertions, short

and sweet as the moment itself." More specifically: "What a jolt he

always received from Romanesque structures; he at once felt their

proportions in himself, in his shoulders, his hips, the soles of his

feet, like his actual, hidden body." The empathic internalization by

means of a compulsive/obsessive narrative mechanism is the obverse of

the extrojecting process as we find it so vigorously employed in

T.A.O.A.W. Handke, at any event, still maintains the possibility of

the "immaculate perception."

For an elaboration of the "child" theme see the Fall 1990 issue of

The St. Monica Review, or wait for the completion of my Peter Handke:

The Dictator of Syntax, which will answer questions you never knew you

had! Best of all: read Child Story itself.



HOVERING: Lesson of St. Victoire informs W.A.T.V. in the sense that

the entire text, I think, is meant to "hover" in the kind of 'as if'

state in which Handke sees the relationship of natural objects in a

Cezanne painting, an entertainable and captivating ideal text,

rearranged by the artist."Great spirit of the universe come down upon

us once today, unfold thyself in the wide space of air, let us hover a

touch above the floor and lift-leap as the tip of a parachute up

inside our chest," and I know that in a few instances I succeeded in

making the language dance: "At those moments daylight was rubbed out,

all that was left glistening metal racks with the many-colored

clothes, the plastic floor and the closet air, hair dyed to death here

there everywhere, shadows not eyes and the wounded red of

fingernails."... Or: "And has time really passed since one night two

were wild and hot and magma-fluid-like, the empty field around us a

main dance floor filled by us alone, the sky above warm breathing skin

body within, the world as small as wind-tinge and we inside a

secret!"... Or: "The holes in the wall are ready as firing slots were

ROLOFF 39 W.A.T.V./P.S.
centuries ago, and the gilded script on the war memorial smoulders.

The dank inside the boxwood hedges is aflutter with moths and other

nightlife." This last already a darker dance. But once you had

succeeded in licking sentences like that...



DIDACTICISM

Handke as the "layer down of the law" appears not

Cezanne .. probably meets with the greatest resistance... where's the

carrot at the end of that stick...



Cezanne/ Nova....

















17] As compared to Ralph Mannheim or his F.S. & G. editor's version,

where the pathos of Handke's long trope is chopped into three easily

consumable American bites.



18] pathos



19] Inbrunst





ROLOFF 40 W.A.T.V./P.S.
20] Handke's all-embracing "medievalism" [his own term] -- German

commentators refer to it as an "archaeological perspective" allegedly

marking all his work -- first became prominent in the film and short

novel The Lefthanded Woman where the protagonist withdraws from the

physicality of the bonds of this world into "mythic existentialism."

In A Slow Homecoming this aspect regrounds itself in the "geological"

time measures -- the "peaceful" forms of nature; interestingly, even

in the inorganic, in the shapes of moraines and landscapes formations

[the residues of "a continuable history" where what Handke called the

"good self" appears as a restraint at some strata even in the most

horrendous dreams. The medievalism lends a holding organizing, sorting

structure to the fantasy -- Handke, later, noted himself, with some

apparent surprise, that A.S.H. was really a "medieval" text... a

matter I will not pursue further here.



21] "And the thought came to him that back then, eight hundred years

ago, at least in Europe, for the duration of one stylistic period,

human history, individual as well as collective, had been wonderfully

clear. Or was that only an illusion conveyed by this absolutely

consistent form (not a mere style)?}" [apropos Soria's San Gregorio

church in The Essay on the Jukebox].



22] Handke's sometimes so irritating exhibitionism is consumed by the

choice of these figures, and truly generously sublimated in its

transformation into these self-displaying addresses, these self-

exhibitions, these murals or, if you will, COMPLEAT cartoon balloons

of a redeemed socialist realism; a socialist realism that transfigures

every wart on Handke's and Fra Angelico's "gold leaf ground"... which

entertains the idea of the "village" and of "workers" lives with a

generosity that also redeems or at least seeks to, for who could care

and what difference unfortunately does it make, a whole world of once

misappropriated concepts and feelings; that have now been co-opted by

what? Advertising and marketing? Even the Nietzche sentence "Your art

is for the healthy, and the artists

ROLOFF 41 W.A.T.V./P.S.
are fit for life -- they form the people." questionable as it may be

when applied to some moments in Handke's life, but what is health

these days?, In German this Nietzche quote still carries quite

impossible Nazi implications. That's what's nice about translations,

it's another way of "going home to a foreign country!" And not needing

to trouble yourself too deeply about the spots where too many dirty

crustaceans have collected.





23] Production Footnotes

a] Chants: These perhaps should be delivered "oo, ah, aha, oo, ah,

aha" North American Indian fashion, and why not river-boat drunkenly

too, and not just be informed, as I hope they are in this translation,

by that "one resounding" sound that Handke, and many others hear, in

Jim Fogerty's Credence Clearwater Revival tracks.



b] Caravan Music Unless I misread Handke [but where?]: what he refers

to as Caravan Music for Nova's last speech has not anything to do

with the desert: he is referring to the music of Johann Sebastian

Bach! -- whose woodwinds, if Bach is used [which Bach?], perhaps ought

to be done with the deep "om" sonorities of the aborigines' or New

Agers' diddereedoo, that long hollow trunk which, if blown into the

ground, can be used to transmit sound waves through the earth: would

that upset Theodor Adorno or not? who berated those who defended Bach

against the "Preservation Hall" which insists the music be done with

original instruments. But perhaps Handke is really asking for the

music of the Sahel.

c] Masks...



ROLOFF 42 W.A.T.V./P.S.
24 A] Though I had finally, in 1980, been ready to read and had read

during a very high time, and been overwhelmed, on first reading by A

Slow Home-Coming, the title novel of the Home Coming Cycle, I had not

dwelled on what might be the dramatic correlative to the novel's

whelming pathos, to those hallucinatory intensities that could burnish

a Fifth Avenue pothole, and to its linguistically registered ultra-

sensitivities -- as Kaspar, for example, had been equivalent and

summary to an entire body of work. As a matter of fact, I didn't even

know that there was a cycle in the oven! I read The Lesson of Saint

Victoire and Child Story only after translating W.A.T.V. They had not

been sent me; the same goes for D.G.D.B.; also, I was deep in a

"Downtown" N.Y. world. And though I had visited Handke on the

Monchsberg after returning from Bulgaria, high and rich from what

seemed a successful peace mission but also "courtesy of malpractice"

on a tiny white pill -- "The doctors, they don't stick to us, " comes

to mind in this regard -- I hadn't really fathomed the grandeur (or

mere grandiosity?) of my author's priestly ambition, that it would

extend to replacing the venerable Jedermann; not that Handke doesn't

undercut and cross-cut his grandiosity as well, at least in some

respects ["City slicker with the sun shades and white slacks, big gent

with the fat wad loose in your pockets."] and extend, in a very

grandfatherly fashion, to laying down the law; to being an oracle. Is

that what Sorger is coming home from Alaska for? Is that what the

"Left-handed Woman" is preparing herself for in the little Grunderzeit

castle on the outskirts of Paris in the film of the same name? Handke

was entering a new, differently directly activist phase.



24 B] What did the fellow, then in the early 80s the lord of the

monks' burg above the Salzach, who did his writing in what looked like

a monk's cell but his receiving in the Archbishop's quarters, who had

imported his split wife to be part of the display on the mountain so

everything would look right and proper in an old-fashioned way, have

up his sleeve now? It certainly had been, by the then of our fifteen

years acquaintance, something different each time. And so it has

continued to be. But no, Handke did not want me to have the text

without all the final changes; perhaps he had already discovered an

author's Proustian pleasure -- pain for a publisher -- of doing the

final draft in galleys!



ROLOFF 43 W.A.T.V./P.S.
Galleys of the text arrived in fall 1981 with the briefest of

notes: "Nichts furs Geschaft, nur zum langsamen Lesen." -- "Nothing

for business, only for slow perusal." After a quick and superficial

first read, I dashed off my first response to the godsend that would

blow up in my face, future obsession, albatross, rosary, litmus test

for sensibility, test for an intelligent heart, for responsiveness of

that kind, and phrasing my response as enigmatically, as orphically as

its first intimations to me had been, I wrote to the effect that the

work brought to mind a certain village and its region I had spent some

early childhood time in. I wanted to show that yes I knew the wave

length; but it was of course a superficial response, as I can be

initially. -- And Handke did not let the response pass unnoticed, as

he can many other things; came back to it even a second time. The

setting of the play scenes, its tone & imagery -- the cemetery wall,

the church and its plaza and fountain, the orchards, the bears, the

gulches, the rushing island-split Inn [the river, near Passau in this

instance], with the huge ancient cloister beetling over the abyss

below; the weather, the war, the storm-flattened wild forest were the

evoked recollections of a Catholic setting in which I had once been

spent time and been ill in at age 5. The confusions of the unconscious

mnemic system!

It was important to Handke that I recognize the piece as an

objective piece, and perhaps my idea that it might be infused with

Catholicism irked him. But that certainly is one aspects of its

reception. Where every day and every moment is sacred, holy. This,

after all, has been Handke's subject at least until the assaying on

Der Gegluckte Tag. W.A.T.V. strikes me as infused with the finest

rural Catholicism,* or sheer religiosity if you like, and I find this

not only unobjectionable but marvelous, as the play is marvelous, a

marvel of language among other things. That is the plays' gold-leaf

ground. -- And I suppose Handke is right when he claims that the piece

is "objective" & "materialistic" [see Good Advice above]; its overall

ambiguity, its enigmatic quality ultimately has a differently

liberating effect from what is so often claimed for works of art. It

makes you literally breathe differently. No doubt Mr. Handke, too.



ROLOFF 44 W.A.T.V./P.S.
On arriving in Salzburg and mentioning that a Viennese actress had

recognized me as Sorger as I was reading A Slow Homecoming, Handke

told me that that was no the case "No I thought of you only once."

What might that thought have been, and what kind of author was that

who remembered every thought he'd had about a work but managed to be

so good at forgetting in every other respect!

*Richard Gilman to whom I sent the piece once completed, responded

by telling me of the serious considerations he had given to converting

to Catholicism.



25] The years of translating -- especially the intense periods of

involvement with his texts during the preparation for productions --

from Public Insult to T.A.D.O. -- had alerted me to a quality I had

not encountered elsewhere: it was that these texts, even in as Shavian

a play as T.A.D.O., kept giving me [and the actors] more and more and

more; they were mysteriously and continuously enriching texts, and

mystery plays only in that sense; for you could account for how they

'worked' in other respects in what for a supra-rational person like

myself! a mystic rationalist, is an "artistically logical" manner --

as unusual as these pieces are counter-poised to the world in most

instances. -- The effort of working on the texts repaid itself each

period of rehearsal... and here in my "solo" rehearsal space, my

rickety barque of a downtown Manhattan loft! W.A.T.V. is exorbitant,

and its exorbitance was welcomed and passed on, radically, by my own.



26] Carl Weber directed the official premiere of Kaspar at the

Brooklyn Academy of Music; this was after considerable work on the

text with Herbert Berghof and E.G. Marshal; and also with Peter Brook

whose English language production however never saw the light of day.

Carl also directed fine first productions of The Ride Across Lake

Constance at Lincoln Center in 1971; and of They Are Dying Out at the

Yale Drama School in 1979.



ROLOFF 45 W.A.T.V./P.S.


27] And challenged differently of course each time: emotionally,

exhaustingly so, and musically by Nelly Sachs; [Hesse had been taxing

to the extent of the laboriousness involved in transforming his

German, which seemed especially antiquated in the early 60s, into

halfway modern American]; intellectually-emotionally by every comma in

Musil's Die Portugiesin [The Portuguese Wife]. Translating some early

Kroetz plays had been a figuring out the equivalences for broken

language; interesting puzzle work of fitting emotions onto starved

words, or between them. It was a pleasure to have been accompanied by

the brilliance of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's essays on the trip

halfway around the world on the ill-named "Hellenic Splendor" in

1972/3. The arduousness of translating what is Hochhut's in Tell 38!

And I did him no favor by achieving the feat of writing like Hochhut

in English. The challenges of the varieties of Erich Wolfgang Skwara's

poetic novel The Plague in Siena were daunting but also tremendously

pleasurable, and his Tristan Island, currently, presents an entirely

new set of challenges. In general, though, the worse the unnamed

writer, the harder the translation work. I nearly forgot the pleasure

of working with Louise Bogan on some Ernst Juenger text many years

ago; and the great pleasure of working with Carl Weber on Handke, but

especially on Heiner Mueller's Description of a Picture. I think

that's it folks.



28] The sections which made for the happiest work, because it harks

back to the serial procedures at the end of Public Insult -- I was

able to play most freely within the strictures of my linguistic

playpen while abiding the bounds and bond imposed by the play rules of

the formalist serial procedure; the reader may notice that, both the procedure and its content has deepened over the years.The sections that made for the greatest difficulty: [A]: the opening poem, its assonances. Like Kaspar's' opening line "I want to be someone like someone else was once." a whole life can be read into this text. [B] Pushing the syntax to its limit, sustaining it, the section which starts with: "Behold how this very moment they are wiping mud with rubber gloves off rubber tires outside while at the same time in the house the rubber-gloved wife is washing mud off rubber boots. Rub-a-dub-dub....[to].... Behold how they reach their objective without ever having gotten there. Behold how untroubled their sleep at the thought that just now it was again forever good-bye." One night, after a phone call to Salzburg -- Handke said that "everything was beautiful" [he knew the ramble from which I was calling -- I knew the height at which he was living] I drenched myself in Jim Fogerty's Credence Clearwater Revival records for hours on end, trying to absorb that "one resounding sound" that the piece calls for, to have it available within the wealth of vowels and consonants, to the consternation of the live-in girlfriend who of course felt neglected for a text! And of course went out to have an affair!

29] January 1983: "To your translation I now only say: yes. It is anachievement, and one notices the fruit of long, precise imagining. With all its strangeness you also found a speaking voice, and it has become a beautiful drama. I am sure that a beautiful performance will be possible which will make sense to quite a few people. That you accomplished that is more than I ever expected from a translation. You achieved a serious and cutting [in the good sense] work.... There is nothing more I wish than that your successful translation will be published in English and played. I cannot imagine a better achievement than what you accomplished..It is also reassuring to know how conscientious [00] you have become..."

July 27, 1983 "Your translation of my piece is the equal of Ralph Mannheim's of the
three prose wings of the homecoming cycle, and with him too, I had long critical boat rides. Your translation remains a beautiful piece of work & anyone who still thinks theater will listen up and look. W.A.T.V. as you formed it, goes back to the origins..."
30]... which, in the retrospect of looking at the first ten pages of the first draft, is putting it kindly. For these bear all the marks of anemia of syntax, and a variety of other shocks of the time.
31] Handke's Essay on the Jukebox contains a fine description of what he means by open and closed. He uses as an example the confessional quarrel that influenced the thinking of Teresa of Avila: between the recogidos [who by means of tightening their muscles] and the dejados who approached god by leaving, relaxed themselves to his entry. Open in the sense of W.A.T.V. of course is also in the sense of giving. Psychoanalytically or somatically speaking, what Handke means by "being" has to do with being able to breathe freely, i.e. a release from constricting angers, rages, consequent chest and heart constrictions, walking and writing being the best "natural" cures for this "nature boy." He writes himself and us out of these confines by first putting us into them!

32] By late fall of 1981 I had a draft. I remember reading it at Christmas to the family that had given that Einsteinian gnome of an intellectual and translator Norbert Gutermann [who had had had an adventurous World War One youth in Poland] the kind of cottage that I myself sought for my work; reading it out loud to the family helped and I liked the response.
THIS IS A LONG PIECE ABOUT UEBER DIE DOERFER/WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, WHICH FIRST APPEARED AS THE POSTSCRIPT OF MY TRANSLATION, AS PUBLISHED BY ARIADNE PRESS IN 1996



W.A.T.V. HEAD-ON

THE TITLE & THE PLACE & PLAY-PLACES

TIME & THE "TIME PLAYS"

Syntax; Alternating Discourse

THE HOME-COMING CYCLE & ITS COMMONALITIES :

Nature, The Child, Pathos

Medievalism & Heartfelt Irony; Didactics

DRAMATIC MEANS

As Collage; As an Essay

THE CHARACTERS & SUGGESTIONS FOR PRODUCTIONS

THE TRANSLATION The "Task"; Handke's "Sound Advice"

And in the Analytic Situation

Aftermath

Notes [1-40]

The Larger & the Dramatic Background;

Glosses on "Dancing Language," "Being," "Thresholds," etc.

W.A.T.V. HEAD-ON

"Should the dramatic poem be my story and that of my family and siblings? -- No, compared to what I experienced with my relatives (and they with me) it should be a great invention," Handke wrote in
D.G.D.B. [1]

W.A.T.V.'s underlying "STORY LINE", its skeletal "occasion," is the "prodigal" but homesick writer-journeyman Gregor's [Handke's favorite self-appellation, also in A Moment of True Feeling and his

1994 novel Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht [1994] return to his home village to sort out the disagreement he and his brother Hans, a construction worker, and his shopkeeper sister Sophy are having over the disposition of their parents' house: "They built it almost entirely alone and so sunk a few years of their life into it. The land, too, was only made arable with the labor of their hands: They seized a spring in a rock and laid pipes yards underground -- do you know what that means? -- leading the water to the garden and to the
house." The simple symbolism suffices to build a Gaudi castle that seeks to encompass the "world village" and indeed suffices for an anchor, for the objectification of the "purely personal." Poetically charged objectified subjectivity is the formula to which this can be
reduced. Moreover, W.A.T.V. has the simplicity of the bedrock of Handke's and therefore of everyone's family story. Starting with three siblings and a set of dead parents, the "Site Mother" and the "Old Woman," the sense of family is extended gradually throughout the play into something universal. [2] However, the defense of self-made property goes hand in hand with little ambivalence towards the rich and powerful: "Today the mighty

are the disenchanted. Haven't they lacked all secrets for ages?... They are unriddled and resoundingly dead," Gregor the Generous ultimately resolves the conflict among the siblings through self-abnegation, which is certainly a daring thing to throw in the faces of the "fat Austrians" that made Handke throw up with disgust in W. O. W. "Stop gabbing about twos of this or that and don't offer the devil's profile to your descendants?" Yet, as in most instances, this proposition, too, is balanced, in the over-all argumentation by Sophy's: "Show me the one who claims to be so wise as to have renounced and I will show you the master of excuses."
The ACTION [as compared to the "story line" that was grazed above]

in this by and large very still piece, quite properly are the

sentences: the words are in the foreground, that is what you are forced to hearken to, that is what affects you, you are meant to reflect with your heart and soul and mind. Simply as most of the sentences are cast, novels' worth of living and observing and imagining and literary experience lies behind each of them. Thus they approximate hieroglyphics, condense, become archaic, are held by an image, the older language; most every sentence is as rich as a metaphor, they are even haikus of sorts. And are made to live anew --e.g. Strindberg's "It's a pity about us humans" becomes "It's no pity about us humans," in Hans' angry speech.

THE TITLE & THE PLACE AND THE "PLAY PLACES"
Did Handke mention, in writing in 1981 that he was sending a new play, that it's title was Uber die Dorfer? -- I don't recall. However, the seven-league boots title "Across the Villages" under which it packed with me for many years never really fit. Nor [as simply] did "About the Villages" do the title trick. Courtesy of a Roger Downey nudge I finally took "the plunge" to call my version WALK About The Villages, a several imprecation from the dramatic poem itself. After all, W.A.T.V. has the primordial quality of the forever-primitive's forever both familiar and estranged existential walk-about the world village; whose world's play-place-boards, by the end of the piece, amazingly glow with the sense of being both revivified and cleansed: how did the wizard achieve this exorcism? "Let us this evening be who we are --
human beings of a primordial time, and use the tongues inside our

mouths to bend the moon behind the boughs, the snailhouse in the mud

and iron rods in the cement into one unity." -- That kind of poetic

existentialism is bedrock here. This is the existentialist room in his

many existentialist mansions and covered wagons that Peter Handke is

inhabiting at the time of the writing of W.A.T.V. [3]

#

Reading around D.G.D.B. [Die Geschichte des Bleistifts, the as yet

untranslated successor to Weight of the World (W.O.W.)] which is so

informative on the thought that Handke gives to his work, I find:

"Among all the dramatists Aeschylus strikes me as the most complete;

no intrigue, only the power of words; pure drama." And: "It is

possible to repeat something else from Greek drama, to play something

in front of a place: in front of palace, in front of a tent, in front

of a grove; so that the actions, the story, what is violent occurs

inside, invisibly: 'Medea goes into the house to kill her children.'"

The theater places in which W.A.T.V. seeks to evoke a primordial

sense of being are: in front of the curtain -- Scenes I & III; the

space in front of a construction site [II], and before a cemetery wall

[IV]. There is no further mise en scene. The rest of the world, the

world off stage, the natural world and its significance, and what

ROLOFF 3 W.A.T.V./P.S.
occurs inside the "barracks" and behind the "cemetery wall", are

indeed evoked solely by means of poetic language; with the result that

W.A.T.V. is certainly "edifying", and renovates the whole idea of

"edification", too, in this unedifying world. Moreover, it renovates,


from vim wender's premiere of UEBER DIE DOERFER in Salzburg, 1981