Anne Janusch
Photo by Starsha Gill
Bio
Annie Janusch’s translations include works by Jürgen Goldstein, Wolf Haas, Anja Kampmann, Heinrich von Kleist, and Uwe Tellkamp. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently a visiting lecturer in the University of Chicago’s creative writing program, where she teaches workshops in literary translation and is fiction editor for Chicago Review.
Walter Kappacher’s Palace of Flies (Der Fliegenpalast) is set in August 1924 in the mountains outside Salzburg. A writer returns to the town where his family spent summers when he was a child and finds that much has changed—the First World War’s still a fresh wound in Austria, and indeed, throughout Europe. Although he sets out with a writer's retreat in mind, his health soon begins to suffer, triggered by a fainting spell that he experiences one day while out walking. Palace of Flies reads as a meditation on aging, as a writer grapples with the collision of past and present, as well as physical and artistic decline.
It was not until 2009 when the Büchner Prize was announced that Walter Kappacher first came to my attention. Although the Büchner Prize is awarded for a writer’s complete oeuvre, Der Fliegenpalast was explicitly praised among Kappacher’s novels in the laudatory remarks. Indeed, what distinguishes Der Fliegenpalast is the way in which it showcases Kappacher’s fine work as a stylist, while providing him with a persona through which to reflect on the life of the writer—consequently, placing him in conversation with his own literary heritage.
The National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship is the preeminent award for American literary translators. Receiving it has meant authorizing myself to not only make space for translation, but to elevate it to the same seriousness of habit and purpose as the other demands in my life. I am grateful to the NEA for valuing the work of translators through its fellowship program—and for introducing English readers to Kappacher’s work for the first time through my translation.
From Palace of Flies by Walter Kappacher
[translated from the German]
Most of the clouds had cleared in the afternoon sun. Cautiously, he climbed over the fence stile marking the edge of the property. When he came out onto the meadow path, he heard cowbells clanking. And with it came the thought that—as with so much else these past few years—he would have to give up on Timon. Bundle it into a thick file, strike it from memory for a year at least. And on occasion, this, too, gave rise to the thought that, just as Sebastian Isepp had simply quit painting, he might have to give up writing plays entirely in favor of merely keeping a journal. How would he support himself? Journalism? Accept the offer from the American newspaper to work as a European correspondent of some sort?
He sat down on the bench, took off his hat, and wiped the sweat from his forehead and neck with his handkerchief. Fallen leaves covered the meadow floor. How exquisite—and how curious—that fine, coarse tangle of nerves on each leaf. One of the leaves had been nibbled upon—by a beetle or a caterpillar? On the ground to his left, he saw the silvery transparent trail of slime left by a snail. Indeed, it had likely been a maple leaf. How perfectly organized it all was, the transport of fluids from the tree's roots to the very tips of its leaves.
He reached for his notebook to jot down a line he had read in a French newspaper, a selection of Paul Valéry’s aphorisms: A plagiarist is one who has poorly digested the essence of others. Reading it brought to mind what critics had said of him time and again over the years: a plagiarist, an epigone. As though his forebears had not themselves learned by emulating the masters.
Great art, he thought, consists of looking toward the Greats to seek out the right voice—in order to take heart in that voice and then channel it into one’s own … Indeed, at times, when no opening lines cared to develop themselves into prose, when nothing seemed to work, he liked to pick up a volume of Goethe’s essays on art. When compelled by nature and art, the youth believes that only by vigorous striving will he force his way into the innermost sanctum; after roaming at length, however, it is the man who realizes that he shall forever find himself merely in the antechamber. Just a few sentences sufficed, and he would have firm ground beneath his feet again. To inhabit a voice, a solid foundation is necessary.
While lying on the bench after his fall on Monday, still half-unconscious, he felt something beckoning him—but to where? Then, he came to, and marveled at the lush canopy of leaves of the beech tree above him. Perhaps that was what beckoned him. In years young, on occasion… How did it go again, those lines from Terza Rima?
Knowing that life now from each drowsy limb
To trees and grasses travels like a flood…
The railing of the little bridge that crossed the river—one of the posts was missing, causing it to wobble—that was where it had begun. Stacked aslant beside the river was a woodpile, as tall as it was long, secured to a spruce tree by a chain. Nevertheless, each time he crossed the bridge, he became fearful that the mighty pile would break loose and bury him beneath it.
_________________________
The lines quoted from Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Terzinen über Vergänglichkeit" are in Michel Hamburger's translation.
Excerpt in the original German was not submittedAbout Walter Kappacher
Walter Kappacher was born in 1938 in Salzburg, Austria. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including novels, short fiction, and essay collections. In 2009, the same year in which Der Fliegenpalast (Palace of Flies) was published, Kappacher was awarded German literature’s most prestigious honor, the Georg Büchner Prize.