Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  The first achievement of Blindness is to be rid of all this, of all, or nearly, those mannerisms of method that dog the earlier books and have didacticism and satire descending into empty verbosity or worse still facetiousness. From page one, Blindness takes itself entirely seriously, and rightly so. A man sitting in his car at a traffic light goes blind. His blindness seems to pass from person to person, at a glance, as it were. Within a few days everybody in the city, which in this book is the world, is blind. Everybody, that is, but one woman, the wife of the optometrist who examined the first blind man. It is on her and the group who gather around her that the narrative focuses, and it is through her eyes, for there are no others, that the drama is observed.

  Curiously, the phenomenon of universal sightlessness quickly clarifies the question of how much we can expect of political intervention and how far human suffering is inevitable. While the optometrist repeatedly comments on the need “to organise’, it becomes clear, as the narrative catalogues the painstaking efforts needed to achieve even the simplest ends, that no amount of organisation will ever be enough to guarantee the most basic requirements of food and hygiene. Blind, the human race can at last be forgiven for not solving all its humanitarian problems. The optometrist’s wife observes, ‘here no one can be saved,’ and continues, ‘blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.’

  In such crisis conditions, as The Gospel reminded us, ‘it’s every man for himself. So the novel sets out to chart, effectively enough, that descent into anarchy and bestiality that we have all read about and shuddered at elsewhere: the thefts, the rapes, the gang terror, the humiliation, the murder, and this in a world where every technical aid has failed, where every room and street is swamped in excrement and filth. A dignified sense of self, we are made to see, prerequisite of moral behaviour, has very much to do with our being able to keep an eye on each other.

  But what distinguishes Saramago’s story from other cataclysmic tales of human degradation is the quality of the drama that builds up around the one seeing character, wife of the optometrist. The account of how the dynamic of the marriage alters, how her personality grows as she assumes both political and moral authority, is at once psychologically convincing and rich with possible analogy. She becomes willy-nilly a mother and a god to her companions, husband included, and as such is faced with appalling choices: in particular, her discovery that there comes a moment when it is a moral obligation to kill another human being is daring and in narrative terms totally gripping. But finest of all is the way, despite the growing distance between the minds of the sighted and the blind, despite the horror and filth to which she is constantly exposed, this woman develops a growing physical tenderness towards the other members of the group, a sort of desperate respect for the human body, her own and others’, which she transmits to her companions by simple acts of practical love.

  Towards the end of the book, when in the derelict city, without power, water or food, the group has finally found an empty apartment to sleep in, the wife is woken in the middle of the night by the sound of rain. She rushes out onto the balcony: ‘Don’t let it stop, she murmured as she searched in the kitchen for soap and detergents, scrubbing brushes, anything that might be used to clean a little, at least a little, of this unbearable filth of the soul. Of the body, she said, as if to correct this metaphysical thought, then she added, it’s all the same.’ She gets the two other women in the group to help her wash the clothes - ‘we are the only woman in the world with two eyes and six hands’ - and then themselves.

  there are three naked women out there, as naked as when they came into the world, they seem to be mad, they must be mad, people in their right mind do not start washing on a balcony exposed to the view of the neighbourhood … my God, how the rain is pouring down on them, how it trickles between their breasts, how it lingers and disappears into the darkness of the pubis, how it finally drenches and flows over the thighs, perhaps we have judged them wrongly, or perhaps we are unable to see this the most beautiful and glorious thing that has happened in the history of the city, a sheet of foam flows from the floor of the balcony, if only I could go with it, falling interminably, clean, purified, naked. Only God sees us, said the wife of the first blind man, who despite disappointments and setbacks clings to the belief that God is not blind, to which the doctor’s wife replies, Not even he, the sky is clouded over, Only I can see you. Am I ugly, asked the girl with the dark glasses. You are skinny and dirty, you will never be ugly, And I, asked the wife of the first blind man, You are dirty and skinny like her, not as pretty, but more than I, You are beautiful, said the girl with the dark glasses, How do you know, since you have never seen me, I have dreamt of you twice … I too see you as beautiful, and I never dreamt of you, said the wife of the first blind man, Which only goes to show that blindness is the good fortune of the ugly, You are not ugly, No, as a matter of fact I am not, but at my age, How old are you, asked the girl with the dark glasses, Getting on for fifty, Like my mother, And her, Her, what, Is she still beautiful, She was more beautiful once, that’s what happens to all of us, we were all more beautiful once, You were never more beautiful, said the wife of the first blind man.

  More daring and more disturbing here than all the metaphysical high jinks of The Gospel is the notion that full humanity is achieved only through suffering, which thus becomes, and this idea is provocative and entirely alien to Western political idealism, necessary. When shortly after these and other manifestations of tenderness, people begin, one by one, to see again, it is both a relief, and not so. Do we really have to pass through every sort of horror, before we can open our eyes?

  A Prisoner’s Dream

  [Eugenio Montale]

  Concluding his poem ‘To Silvia’ in 1828, Leopardi turns on the abstraction that had been his childhood companion: hope. The lines of that bitter address were to become some of the most quoted in Italian poetry:

  Ail’apparir del vero

  Tu, misera, cadesti: e con la mano

  La fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda

  Mostravi di lontano.

  When the truth dawned

  You faded wretchedly; and raising

  A hand showed me cold death

  In the distance and a dark grave.

  Dwarf-like, ugly, hunchbacked, the figure of the unhappy Leopardi dominates his country’s poetry throughout the nineteenth century, and the central intuition of his work, its driving force, is his compelling awareness of the nothingness behind all human illusion, the fact that if there is one thing that will not help us to live it is the naked truth. His writing fizzes with the excitement of what may best be described as negative epiphany -a horror made a litde less unbearable only by the thrill of its revelation, the eloquence of its articulation.

  A scholar of immense erudition, Leopardi wrote frequently of the need to elaborate some collective illusion that might save society from the corrosive effects of a futility now evident, he imagined, to all. But he was too clear-headed a man to offer illusions himself, nor in the end could he admire the susceptibility of others. One of the last entries in his enormous diary suggests three things humankind will never accept: that they are nothing, that they achieve nothing, that there is nothing after death.

  Born in 1896, Eugenio Montale begins his work in the immediate shadow, not of Leopardi, but of a poet who did have a vocation for illusion on a vast scale, a man whose fantastic pantheism and extraordinary mastery of the Italian language produced the most purple celebrations of the world, humanity, nature and above all himself. It is not surprising that D’Annunzio would find himself in tune with the aberration of Fascism, nor can Leopardi be blamed if the enthusiasm for collective illusion that characterised the first half of the twentieth century should end so badly. Growing up in provincial Genoa, writing his first lines in the atmosphere that would bring Mussolini to power, Montale’s first concern, then, is to establish his distaste for the still rising star of D’Annunzian grandiloquence and the grotesque co
mplacency that is its inspiration. Perhaps necessarily the young poet looks back to Leopardi, as much on a personal level as anything else. He feels alienated, where D’Annunzio epitomises not so much integration as the very spirit that coalesces the crowd. Montale hates crowds. Like Leopardi, he feels emotionally, perhaps sexually inadequate where. D’Annunzio likes to appear as the nearest thing to Pan himself. But what Montale cannot share with his role model Leopardi, or indeed with a poet like Eliot to whom he has frequently been compared, is the thrill of that negative epiphany. He will not indulge in grand gestures of apocalyptic despair. Rather he begins on the stoniest of ground, carefully measuring his distance from those who precede him, rejecting intoxications whether positive or negative. As can happen with the greatest of artists, voice and direction are all there in the first stanza of the first poem of the first collection.

  Enjoy if the wind that enters the orchard

  brings back the tidal flow of life:

  here, where a dead

  tangle of memories sinks under,

  was no garden, but a reliquary.

  Deprecating, apparently trapped in a domestic backwater, oppressed by a moribund past, the young Montale is frequently obliged to define his early vision by negatives. The second stanza of this poem 'In limine’ (“On the Threshold’) warns, perhaps reassures: ‘The whirr you’re hearing is not flight.’ The collection’s closest thing to a manifesto tells us:

  Don’t ask us for the phrase that can open worlds,

  just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch.

  This, today, is all that we can tell you:

  what we are not what we do not want.

  (‘Non chiederci’)

  Cuttlefish Bones was published in 1925. Its arid landscape is oppressively illuminated, bleached even like the bones of its title, by the scorching sun of Ligurian summers. The sound of the sea, in turns threatening and reassuring, is never far away. Inside the confining walls of his orto - the Italian kitchen garden, locus of unchanging domestic subsistence - the protagonist is starved of life; outside, along the seacoast, he is thrilled, overwhelmed, frightened, humbled. At first glance, the subject matter of the collection would appear to be a yearning for epiphany, for some way out of confinement that would not mean destruction. Barriers suggest a beyond and thus encourage yearning, but turn out to be insuperable. Montale differs from his nineteenth-century predecessors, however, in his implicit acceptance of this condition. He never rails. The underlying stupor at the nature of existence that informs the whole collection could never be characterised as angry surprise. He seems old beyond his years.

  And walking in the dazzling sun,

  feel with sad amazement

  how all life and its torment

  is here in following this wall

  topped with broken bottle-shards.

  (‘Meriggiare’)

  Rapidly, the poet establishes a variety of approaches to the idea of limits and epiphany, approaches which, with endless ingenious variations, will be the staple of a lifetime’s production. Another figure is in the kitchen garden, a girl, a loved one perhaps. Is epiphany possible for her if not for him? Can he help her escape? In this scenario the protagonist’s life might at least have the sense of an oblatory gesture:

  Look for a broken link in the net

  that binds us, you jump through, run!

  Go, I’ve prayed for this for you - now my thirst

  Will be mild, my rancour less bitter.

  (‘In limine’)

  Or again:

  Before I give up I’d like

  to show you this way out,

  unstable as foam or a trough

  in the troubled fields of the sea.

  And I leave you my scant hope.

  I’m too tired to nurse it for the future;

  I pledge it against your fate, so you’ll escape.

  (“Casa sul mare’)

  One young female figure does escape, it seems, with a splendid dive into the sea while the poet, at once too dreamy and too rational can only yearn, admire, reflect:

  At the end of the quivering board

  You hesitate, then smile,

  And, as if plucked by a wind,

  Plunge into the arms of your friend

  And god who catches you.

  We look on, we of the race

  Who are earthbound.

  (‘Falsetto’)

  Later, it seems that the beloved figure can offer as well as receive, help rather than just escape. Tray for me then/that I may come down by another route/than a city street/in the wasted air, ahead of the press/of the living.’ (‘Incontro’) But more often than not, at least in this early collection, the yearning for epiphany is temporarily appeased by a fleeting Keatsian experience not so much of ceasing ‘upon the midnight’ but of feeling one’s confined selfhood dazzled out of its limits in a flood of Mediterranean light.

  Like that circle of cliffs

  that seems to unwind

  into spiderwebs of cloud,

  so our scorched spirits

  in which illusion burns

  a fire full of ash

  are lost in the clear sky

  of a single certainty: the light.

  (‘Non rifugiarti’)

  ‘Disappearing is the destiny of destinies, the poet tells us in another poem, apparently aspiring to the inanimate peace of his cuttlefish bones on the beach, and he concludes:

  Bring me the plant that leads the way,

  to where blond transparencies rise,

  and life as essence melts in haze;

  bring me the sunflower, crazed with light.

  (‘II girasole)

  At such moments, it becomes evident that Montale’s deeper subject is the relationship of self to other, the possibilities of some real exchange, perhaps even communication, between the two, which would be epiphany. His concern is how far it is really possible to speak of such things, in Italian, at the moment he writes; for beneath the surface of his enterprise lies a fear that speech itself may generate the limitations he wishes to overcome. ‘Don’t ask us, he says, ‘for the word that squares/our shapeless spirit on all sides. (‘Non chiederci). Elsewhere he declares with the angst of a Beckett or Cioran: ‘The deeper truth belongs to the man who is silent. (‘So Tora). Hence, along with the vocation ‘to wring the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language as he once put it, there is also a fascination, if not for imprecision, then for all that must elude precise definition, all that must be allowed to remain shadowy, Protean, on the borders of self and other. Everything is in flux, above all consciousness; and poetry, Montale claims in his essay ‘Intentions is ‘more a vehicle of consciousness than of representation.

  The genius of Cuttlefish Bones, then, and indeed much of the poets later work lies in an ever denser play of delicate, indefinable but always convincingly authentic states of mind, which record an individual spirit’s long negotiation with the other: the world, women, poetry, the past. Needless to say this will lead commentators into all kinds of difficulty when it comes to establishing the content of many of the poems, while presenting translators with what often looks like a worst-case scenario. Here is one of the ‘easiest lyrics from Cuttlefish Bones as it appears in Jonathan Galassi’s new translation.

  Haul your paper ships to the seared

  shore, little captain,

  and sleep, so you won’t hear

  the evil spirits setting sail in swarms.

  In the kitchen garden the owl darts

  and the smoke hangs heavy on the roofs.

  The moment that overturns the slow work of months is here:

  now it cracks in secret, now bursts with a gust.

  The break is coming: maybe with no sound.

  The builder knows his day of reckoning.

  Only the grounded boat is safe for now.

  Tie up your flotilla in the canes.

  We have an address to a boy launching paper boats, apparently in danger from evil spirits at large. That familia
r kitchen garden is full of ominous portents. The last stanza is ambiguous as to whether grounding those boats will prevent the disaster occurring or not. Is the builder the boy who built the boats? Probably not. But at least sleep will guarantee unconsciousness. Here is an earlier translation by William Arrowsmith.

  Haul your paper boats

  to the parched shore, and then to sleep,

  little commodore: may you never hear

  swarms of evil spirits putting in.

  The owl flits in the walled orchard,

  a pall of smoke lies heavy on the roof.

  The moment that spoils months of labour is here:

  Now the secret crack, now the ravaging gust.

  The crack widens, unheard perhaps.

  The builder hears his sentence passed.

  Now only the sheltered boat is safe.

  Beach your fleet, secure it in the brush.

  Aside from the cohesion of assonance, rhythm and diction which is very much on Galassi’s side (and this is true throughout his new translation), actual differences are minor, though sometimes intriguing. Presumably Galassi goes for the unusual ‘paper ships’ to achieve alliterative effects with ‘paper’, ‘seared’ and ‘shore’. Arrowsmith’s standard collocation ‘paper boats’ sits closer to the familiar tone of the opening address. But these are the inevitable small swings and roundabouts of translation. Something of the same thing is going on with the apparently irreconcilable versions ‘putting in’ and ‘setting sail’, to describe the activity of those evil spirits, Galassi concentrating once again on achieving assonance (notice also ‘seared’, ‘hear’, ‘here’, or again ‘sound’ and ‘grounded’). But what are these evil spirits up to, are they arriving or departing? Are they only going to ‘spoil’ the work of months, as Arrowsmith’s version weakly suggests, or ‘overturn’ it altogether, as Galassi more dramatically announces. And looked at syntactically, what is the ‘it’ of Galassi’s ‘now it cracks in secret’ - the work, or the moment? What, overall, is the poem about? Here is the original.