Lily Ye: What did you think of the way in which Rezzori is able to voice different characters (as there is a lot of direct quoting in this novel) and how did you approach the translation of these different registers and argots into English?

Philip Boehm: First I have to “hear” the voices in the original. Then I try to find a suitable musical key in English. I also work professionally as a theater director and am often struck by how that activity overlaps my work as a translator—interpreting the text, envisioning the script, clearly defining characters, etc.

In rendering the accents and argots, it’s important to bear in mind that a Russian inflection, say, sounds different to a German ear than to an English one. There are also occasions when it’s best to know the proper mispronunciation.

Read the full text

This is the conundrum that von Rezzori overcomes beautifully in Philip Boehm’s unabridged translation of The Ermine of Czernopol. In this memoir, we are treated to the un-opening of the world, its people and its countries, as understood by a group of children growing up in Czernopol, where there is a little bit of everything thrown together. The narrator speaks for his younger self, a young boy in this group of nigh inseparable siblings, as they eavesdrop upon the conversations of various adults, their primary source of information of the outside world. They listen to their frequent house guest, the prefect Herr Tarangolian, who gossips with authority; their tutor Herr Alexainu, who expounds on the nature of love; and countless others—all the while forming their own collective judgments and implications without fully comprehending what is being said. They dwell on the sounds of words and take delight in particular turns of phrase:

The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association [. . .]. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of a great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexainu had also described as a king of capacity, but to a name—in this case that of a certain Fraülein Kapralik. Of course we had never laid eyes on her, but people said she gave Italian lessons. In any event, beyond our associations with capers and capricious—expressions our father liked to use in reference to us—her name called to mind a fun-loving woman from Capri. A similar wealth of associations opened up when a chance to overlap in pronunciation created by the miracle of fused meanings; for instance, when we heard the newly experienced word ektase—ecstasy—in the name of Năstase, which right away seemed to capture this young man’s tango-like essence.”

Von Rezzori does not condescend a child’s point of view with a child-like vocabulary, but rather uses his rather extensive supply of words with a precision and an ingenuity of combination that, stunningly, do not give a sense of some overly precious precocity but instead imbues in the reader with that sense of wonder and of first understanding that children experience but do not have power to express.

Perhaps the central figure in the text, as the object of the children’s greatest affection and curiosity is the Austrian officer Major Tildy, who they fall in love with immediately, without knowing almost anything about him. They spend the majority of the novel trying to hear more and more about him, as he defends the honor of his sister-in-law, a promiscuous woman from a wealthy family possessing a recognizable nose, and finds himself put away in a mental institution. Such is their infatuation that when they hear he is part German they spend an incredible amount of time speculating on the nature of Germans, and on the beauty of war. For them there is no such thing as a just war—there is just war. They understand the question only in terms of existence. When they are forced to grapple with their observations of Jewish discrimination within Czernopol, which culminates with a great riot in the streets, they understand not “that Jews are also people, but rather the reverse, that people are sometimes also Jews.” And so on, go the discoveries of this group of siblings, the unnoticed eavesdroppers in a city full of both turmoil and laughter.

For children find themselves in the unique position of alterity which still allows them access into realms of privileged knowledge, as it were, because they are not expected to understand the information that passes before their very eyes and ears. Von Rezzori seizes upon this privilege of youth and puts together an exquisitely recounted tale of childhood that contains not only the excitement and wonder of discovery, but also the cutting commentary and revelation that accompany such discovery when precisely expressed.

This is the first book in the Von Rezzori trilogy, which also includes The Snows of Yesteryear and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. All three titles are available from NYRB . . .

Here’s the opening of Lily’s review:

The Ermine of Czernopol is the first of Gregor von Rezzori’s semi-autobiographical novels about growing up in what was Austria-Hungary. In it, childhood is the conduit through which we must understand everything. The thing about a being a child is an unorthodox and oftentimes uncanny mode of perception, due to the foreign nature of those not yet fully socialized, coupled with a certain inability of expression. And this is an inevitable coupling as the very language that could do justice to children’s intuitions is only attainable through the very socialization that would dull these intuitions.

This is the conundrum that von Rezzori overcomes beautifully in Philip Boehm’s unabridged translation of The Ermine of Czernopol. In this memoir, we are treated to the un-opening of the world, its people and its countries, as understood by a group of children growing up in Czernopol, where there is a little bit of everything thrown together. The narrator speaks for his younger self, a young boy in this group of nigh inseparable siblings, as they eavesdrop upon the conversations of various adults, their primary source of information of the outside world. They listen to their frequent house guest, the prefect Herr Tarangolian, who gossips with authority; their tutor Herr Alexainu, who expounds on the nature of love; and countless others—all the while forming their own collective judgments and implications without fully comprehending what is being said. They dwell on the sounds of words and take delight in particular turns of phrase:

“The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association [. . .]. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of a great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexainu had also described as a king of capacity, but to a name—in this case that of a certain Fraülein Kapralik. . . .”

To read the entire review, click here.

Bruce Wolmer: I’m tempted to begin by asking the question interviewers on French TV like to pose: “Gregor von Rezzori, _qui êtes-vous?_”—Who are you? Which is immediately funny considering that the enigmas and paradoxes—and humor—of identity is a central concern of your work. But one wouldn’t know that reading the reviews, where you’re almost inevitably conflated with the first-person narrator.

Gregor von Rezzori: Absolutely. This is such an old discussion: To what extent are books autobiographic? It’s ridiculous. As Flaubert famously said, Mme. Bovary c’est moi. You can’t eliminate yourself totally unless you’re Shakespeare.

BW: That goes against the grain of much contemporary opinion and practice, which claims to be getting down to the truth of the author rather than the truth of the fiction.

GvR: The Death of My Brother Abel is narrated by a writer. The narrator, the “I”—and funnily enough he is less my own person than any other first person in any of my other books—the narrator in The Death of My Brother Abel is a totally fictitious character. But, of course, nowadays people have little curiosity about examining such complexities. There is this desire of authenticity and transparency which connects with the curious contemporary belief that everybody is, or should be, an artist.

I must tell you that when I was young I never had the faintest idea that I should ever become a writer. I studied mining engineering, of all things. I came to writing by accident at a rather ripe age. I never thought of really having the urge to express myself, but obviously I had it in some way or other. But without ever having heard the phrase, I had to find my identity. That’s one of those dreadful verbal expressions. A phrase like that becomes fashionable and then becomes a slogan and becomes really a program for people’s lives. Every young man or girl nowadays ponders about his or her identity without even realizing what it is. My identity is “I”. It takes a long time to learn that that much celebrated “I” is never lost, but never really found either.

Anyway, in my case I was having a period in my life in which I didn’t have anything else to do—this was before the war—so one day I sat down and wrote a story. Somebody got hold of it and sent it to a publisher. They instantly wanted me to write another one, which I did. Because I thought, my God, this is a very agreeable way of earning money. How wrong I was I found out later. But by then it was too late.

BW: A disagreeable way of not earning much money.

GvR: Yes, yes. Somebody with a little bit more intelligence doing the same amount of work, you’ll become an Onassis. Well, who needs that? But it’s in real disproportion. Then when I realized what crap I had been writing, you see, I sat down, and just then the war came. I was fortunate—I didn’t actually have to be a soldier exactly. I was born in Bukovina, Rumania. Before Rumania went into the war it was given to the Russians so I was already more or less a Russian although I still had a Rumanian passport and was living in Vienna at that time. When Bohemia was taken by the Russians I went to our ambassador in Berlin, who was a friend of the family, and I said, “What shall I do, what am I supposed to do?” He said, “Well, you are supposed to go home and find a new identity because you don’t exist. And then you’ll die from Mr. Hitler because within a short time you shall have to join in those struggles. I can’t prolong your passport. How long is it still valid?” I said. “For a year.” He said, “Keep quiet.” Which I did. It lasted for three more years during the war. I had my share of bombing and all that, but in the meantime I had the opportunity to really fill the unbelievable gaps in my knowledge by reading. I must tell you that I read very slowly and I need months to finish a real masterpiece, for example one of Broch’s novels. [. . .]

BW: What has been Nabokov’s influence on you?

GvR: Well, there were many other influences first. I didn’t read Nabokov until late. But when I had started to write Abel in its first version, I got Nabokov’s Pale Fire in my hand and instantly put my pen down because I found that there was the book I wanted to write already in the best possible form. Then I collaborated on the translation of Lolita into German, and I became aware that I shall never achieve the almost medieval craft of Nabokov’s to link fiction with literary allusion and write a book on many layers—of which one is a direct and fictitiously concrete reality, and behind there is the other reality, the literary reality of all the allusions, all the relations of literature with other literature. At the same time that it’s discouraging, it’s very challenging.

BW: Other influences?

GvR: Everything influences you as a writer, whatever you read. I believe there isn’t any such thing as a bad book, because you take out of any book something by which you learn, even if you throw it away. Then there are writers who encourage me immensely and writers whom I admire so much that I put down my pen and say, “I can’t write.” For instance, I can’t read ten lines of Robert Musil and keep on writing, I stop for a week at least. Even Joyce. He discourages me totally. But then there are others who encourage me. Thomas Mann with his sort of schoolboyish sense of humor challenges me to get a little subtler. Ironic. And so on.

BW: ��è�����Ա�?

GvR: Well, yes. Not consciously, but the violence. In literature, particularly at that period, a certain barbarism is necessary. Also for the sake of honesty. You can’t be suave and God knows what in a time like ours. Also there is in him an urge for iconoclastic action which was also very much an aspect of German Expressionism after the First World War.

You can read the entire interview

We chose this book because of its unique and revealing perspective: von Rezzori works through the recollections of the eyes and ears of a group of children, using “we” almost exclusively, and it is through these children’s growing understanding and point-of-view that von Rezzori uses his power of description and imitation bring to life the discovery of a city and the entanglements of its citizens. Von Rezzori’s extensive vocabulary does not spare his young subjects, and so the reader has the pleasure and the advantage of innocent fascination without the language of innocence.

Much of the narrative centers on the children’s obsession with Major Tildy, an Austrian officer whose extreme attention to propriety and honor and extreme guard against losing face prove very costly. And the city discovered, the city of Czernopol, is diverse to say the least, with the characters featured in this story proving themselves extremely peculiar, whether or not through the hyperbole of childhood. A stint in a mental institution, an acclaimed locksmith poet, a tutor who shuns socks, and a production of The Nutcracker ballet all feature in this insightfully and incisively written book, where children are not spared anything.

This week we will have a full review and an interview with the translator Philip Boehm. Read the to begin your introduction to the city of Czernopol and its peculiar sense of humor.