|
>>>ALL ABOUT THE VILLAGES<<<
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
