A story about readiing, translation, presenting notess on Heissenbuttel [release 1]
“Driven at last to an uncrossable boundary, you have, it is said, crossed a crossable one.” (Brecht)
10PM — I read the translation that begins: “Odipuskomplex made in Germany 1965 Papa hat ungefähr tausend Jahre regiert der Ödipuskomplex des deutschen Volkes heißt Enesdeape danach haben wir es mit Opa versucht das war” The machine translation of this poem was better than the human translation… I failed to stay asleep.
1:00 Insomnia — I open the book. Centre pages, And read the “Poem about Hope” and then “political grammar” and with it in another book I read the; “thirteen hypotheses” then the 7 stanzas of the language program and the soothing “Nightingale in Winter” that seems to call out to the other other texts. Then “Reflections on the 7-fold” 7 dwarfs, 7 fat, 7 lean years, 7 women, self-interrogations. A sister of 7 brothers has secret thoughts. 7 Bodies buried in a woods. I scan another 25 pages of text…
2:00 a.m.: Heissenbüttel’s “compositions” test me and my general condition. From Artaud to Wittgenstein to Benjamin, Heissenbüttel picks apart quotes and produces collages (new.) What a strange Debordian plagiarism is in operation here, in multiple paragraphs, sentences, phrases I am drawn through reflections, which are arranged like new constructions, that are circular, new, whimsical, serious, dangerous. Connecting collages reproduced. The texts hold one in their warm arms… Sleep upstairs… The window is open, i fall asleep to the owls singing. a deer barks.
8:00 AM A cup of Earl Grey, a slice of lemon and a slender spoonful of honey. Heissenbuttel does not mean renunciation, it means concentration, construction: I count the chapters, pages, and make general assumptions around around the 10 textbooks. My mother died, so I am here; From the sentences “not to finish what cannot be finished”. Like an order I take it with me into the further reading now start at the beginning unmagically attracted “Oedipus Complex in Germany” (On the radio bombs are falling on Gaza (again)) “Language is a noise” I read and think of CW, the becoming pamphlet Heissenbüttel “IV l” the the new time and new pamphlets, posts and poems in the bad time pairs with (…) the, the poet. Testifies to old relevances.
9:16 (..) I recognize / I aberkenne / I state / I speak / I do not speak”. Outside, birds are singing. I think about the social media debates that were still going on yesterday. I was indignant, I forced myself, I conquered it, I write, I do not write. I read and don’t. I ignore them, I take notice. I fell asleep, briefly. The trace of saliva look looks like a Z shaped blott on my face. So Z was there. Now she is preparing for her first client of the day. Ignoring my working form. She smiles. 9:68 The Spiritual Exercises of Helmut Heissenbüttel. Concrete, topography and roller coaster function crime according to rules, self-imposed and practiced, mantra-like and labyrinthine in themselves. The semantics a pleasure, because it books itself out of a fragmented erotic moment. stabilizes and forms. I hang on to that for a while. Z has written something in black permanent on my forearm.
10:32 a.m.: Like a situationist dreaming of the beach with pebbles, I stand in the bathroom with the toothbrush whirring in my mouth and speak “red light under chestnuts.” The mirror now needs cleaning. Another day. In the shower, gel shampoo lotion, cleaning Perhaps tonight I’ll sleep…In the kitchen I wake up the espresso machine, poached egg on toast. grammatical meditations. Into the grinder I say: “the blackness of the water and the punctuality of the lights”. I notice how much feeling I draw from the repetitions in his texts.repetitions in his texts: “… and there is there is there does not exist.” Heissenbüttel is an empiricist, an experimenter: “>not and never never<”. Time to walk.
11:30 a.m.: Where is the time running? Two cups of coffee, espresso, talking to Z about work and H. Tired. Her first client is at 12.00, a 50 minute hour that may overrun, then another at 1.30. Deleuze and Guattari arrive. A work of literature is, first of all, an organized, purposeful sequence of words, a minor turn. That of course doesn’t work and not only this — everything so far — calls on the work of my youth, from concrete poetry, the poetry, the loneliness of the of the linguistic materialists, politics, when everyone moved into prose as if it was a it was a culture that could not burn.
Between 11:30 and 12:30 I travel to the meeting. Not all the time, but before that I have to prepare and recover afterwards. More coffee before enteringinginging the building. I think about about the autobiography — buying coffee, Red Brick espresso it says, as I queue. He was always infirm and intense his presence at the meetings of the Academy in Berlin, speak up speak up speak up. I think of the translations at home, on my computer it says> Always good, what he did. So good that I can’t do it, cannot even use his rules and practices. I didn’t have to do it. I never lived under the endescene. i sit in the room, half full now… I am listening to the recording as I type this sentence.. then its full, let’s begin I say I read the beginning of Writers in Immigration:
“The little composure that was shown to the new regime in my circles is quickly used up, and one has to account for the fact that the air is hardly breathable any more; a circumstance that, of course, loses its significance by the fact that one’s throat is tightened. This is especially true in economic terms. With these sentences from a letter to Gerhard Scholem, written or sent on February 28, 1933, still in Berlin, basically begins Walter Benjamin’s emigration and a message about his brother Werner, who had been in pre-trial detention and in concentration camps since 1933 and perished in Buchenwald in 1940: “My last inquiry was not yet before you on May 4. But you had the sad news about your brother. You write that you cannot form a picture of his behavior. I cannot form an impression of mine either. Before I left, I spoke to him by telephone. There had already been two rumors in Wedding, where he lives, that he was dead. In the meantime, the ones I asked you about have confirmed their bases. He fell into the hands of the S. A. five weeks ago and has been a prisoner in the state hospital ever since.” With this moment about two brothers murdered by fascists, we can…
There are perhaps fifty people in the world who might want to read this, I say holding up Textbuch 8. I speak for close to an hour, about the machine translation experiment, explaining why; Heissenbuttel. Translation by human or machine, the technologies used, the processes. A long quote on translation by Francois Jullien. Then we discuss the belief in the human division of labour in translation, language and materialism, what does a human translator do? language and materialism. (<>) The 21st century genocides, the politics, there is only politics, the Marxist theory of crises, what would it be like set to music? Two hours or so pass and after tea, i leave.
Afterwards, in the afternoon I go for a long walk away and yet still heading towards the station. The prose texts are manic, heavy and languid, light and funny — somehow they amuse me. somehow they amuse me very much. I meet a good-looking cat. so I find myself a very happy person. Am I a very happy person? The cat thinks that I smell good. I think the cat smells good. I do not sniff the owner. On the one bench I sit and read a few news stories. On my lap I have to stop, and of course I remember the zwieback comes to mind. And crumbs. And this one man. Could it be set to music? Thinking of Steve Lacey or Jah Wobble.
At 3:45 p.m., I resume reading. Textbook 4. The Talking Words. I immediately have to think of my colleague in NY, and Kassel, of Sam in Barcelona, a poetry landscape, writers in the hills and the water towers, bunker archeology, bunker ethnology, ammunition depots and benches. It seems so gloomy to me. I don’t want it to be. I want it to look like the adventure land of one and a 13-year-old. Words rushing off with the power of your own feet and up a steep wall to get to the next word, the next idea. idea. The trail yields semantics. A train north. At 17:02 In my seventies here, i find myself talking to Heissenbuttul’s text <Hypothesen uber literatur…> So at the beginning. Sipping tea. Do the hypotheses work? Stories like at the bottom of a garden: Germany 1944, I the murdered, Novel, Treatise, Situation, machine translated words, edited. All vocabulary points a way. That all words can’t fill, called the pain rage wound.
6:56: I see myself having conversations about Heissenbüttel’s text “the man who became a lesbian.” This does not have a good end in the now or is it (does it take) the best possible line? “ it is also said also that this was the one who gave Aladdin the house the gensens auch dass dieser derjenige war der der Aladin das Haus das leave the house.
At 8:00 I think about whether I should ever use a comma again. (Whilst prawn biryani eating with Z zero % blonde beer again.) After all without it I have begun to go much more strangely through the text. All ambiguities are welcome the many breathes that the sentences cost the constant new constant new approach in thinking rarely celebrated. One celebrates with. his examination of socialism classes Freud leads me into the night. 8:00 “the limits of my language are the limits of my world the subject does not belong to the world but it is of the world on the other hand all this does not mean that there must be that there must be a world of any thing at all”.
I read the texts as a search movement in language. language, whose structure — I do not write I may briefly read the table of contents aloud again. aloud. I read the table of contents aloud again; aloud. “blackcurrants” “tactical reminiscences” “the new age” “doubtful reporting” “the new age” “the new age” “the new age” “the dilemma of being high and dry” “Pamphlets” “In transit between two situations” “grammatical reductions” “so what” “Max immediately before falling asleep” “Oedipus complex in Germany!” “the conclusion and launching of the material” “Whispered between d’Alembert and Andie on the balcony…” …. Everything works out;
Hats Picasso photographs pile of books
paper flowers from the party of the year before last
cowrie shells Chinese buttons a bronze lizard
the calendar with the dates of days that have passed
dice cup and patience cards
dumped by the years
dumped by the years that I was
