Seventy-Seven Siblings.
By ZSUZSANNA GAHSE.
Translated by Marielle Sutherland
Translator’s note:
The text is experimental writing that combines poetry and prose, not continuous prose but loosely connected voices or “narrative cells”, forming a dizzying array of sibling constellations and the different impressions and tempers of their relationships. Although the title gives us a specific number of siblings, it is unclear how many there actually are – the number may even have been chosen more for its internal sounds than its mathematical accuracy. The siblings’ voices emerge and re-emerge, speaking of their lives and relatives, and sometimes even of their genes. Most of the protagonists come from Vienna, but they have all already fledged and live in different parts of the world. The variety of sisters and brothers is reflected in Gahse’s linguistic diversity. Her sentences approximate to, and move between, poems, prose narratives and essays, continually generating new textual forms. The narrative units present a complex fabric of genetic language and literary echoes. The “stanza titles” are the letters of DNA codes.
CTGA
We are wolf siblings,
my three gangling, well-
grown brothers and I.
We are the epitome of calm, calm, quiet
wolves, this is how we look into each other’s
eyes, criss-crossways into the eyes. The eldest brother
drops down on the grass
and laughs, while the other two
dance as if they came
from the southern hemisphere,
from the Mediterranean, they
are the middle of the world, my
big-headed brothers, I picture them
in my head, the three of them, and while
we concoct the latest plans,
we like to scoff at others,
it gives us strength, the eldest says,
the young man with the beautiful
neck, the full mouth full of
teeth. He walks slow-paced through the
garden, and as soon as I am alone,
I mimic his walk.
Three sisters and a brother,
he is the youngest, the sixth child
of what was originally a family of eight.
Two older brothers died soon
after their birth in Wieden,
there’s a lot of talk about Wieden,
the fourth district of Vienna,
and here four more people
come into play, first, father Leopold
with the nine children he
had to bring up on his own.
Leopold. As if born into this world
as a ready-made father, as if he’d been waiting
in the wings, a bearded man,
as if he had borne his nine children
himself, though his youngest
daughter was two years old
when the mother died. These children,
these siblings, had known one another
for a long time, naked, so to speak,
from the outset, or, at the latest,
from the onset of their first memories.
They knew one another,
these natural siblings.
Two blocks down, the brother is
nowadays almost a father to his
three younger sisters, he is often
sick, the sickly
Mr Brotherfather is a fine
pianist, and the eldest girl,
long since a woman, a gallerist in
the city centre, helps him out.
As of now, there are only
two sisters left.
Three sisters
are quarrelling in the cherry orchard,
they have similar skin,
they sniff together.
Last year, they felt forced to sell the garden, now, since the summer, they have been roaming around between the trees, secretly picking cherries, keeping a cautious eye out along the way, but they still think of the fruits as their own. In the spring, just before blossoming time, they broke off a few branches and put them in large floor vases at home.
All three fall silent
as soon as those two turn up
who pass themselves off as
adoptive siblings and have been a pair
for years. Both of them stare
into the distance, seeing nothing
but distance, and no one
can talk to them.
And the four sisters have
similar skin and smell
similar, or give off a similar
scent, although they use different
perfume, all four waddle
similarly, and their unmarried
brother waddles the same,
to put it kindly. What is
kindly supposed to mean. All people
become brothers, and the
freestanding female figures
lower their heads quickly.
Three too tall young
men, almost still children,
lower their heads and smile.
They keep on growing, hoping
for a joint role
in a feature film – this is
their future, later on, they are
actually hired, and they play
the three daredevil novice detectives.
A fluke, as in the case of the
Red Sisters, a blockbuster.
The story of the Siamese
twin girls is more explosive,
more shocking, and one of those
twins is me, I am the separated
left half, and I was adopted
shortly after the operation.
That’s when I came to Vienna as a toddler.
Unfortunately, back then, a primordial worm
had crept in, brought over in a chest
from Taiwan, a primordial larva,
the invasive primordial larva developed
into a butterfly, and since then it’s been flitting
around, proliferating, you might mistake this
for an incidental event, but the invasion is definitely
one of the transport stories,
it’s in the luggage, and no one
can get rid of it again, so they say.
Apart from that, adoptions hardly ever
cause problems in childhood,
so one day I asked my
two girls whether we
should adopt an orphan,
but they didn’t want to,
they were too young, too little,
I shouldn’t have asked them.
A little later on, they said they would rather grow up in a big family, with seven siblings, with seventeen, and they wondered whether they should pick them all up by train at a seaport or by bus at an airport. But they also liked standing, just the two of them, in front of the mirror, and then there were already four of them.
That’s a while ago now, a few things have changed since then. Not in the mirror – everything is still doubling there – but you can’t talk about gold-rush fever anymore, that’s all over and done with. Some certainly have gained from the new circumstances, but instead of tearing their hair out over it, many are switching to sleep mode.
To a sleep model, said Winnie at our Saturday get-together.
Fifteen children may occur in all
kinds of families, mainly wealthy ones,
among the nobility or the poor,
and the children are siblings.
They are washed in tubs,
unless there are other options. They are
dished up the same food,
the same language. Someone
recites it for them. They eat
roast potatoes or paella
together, and the potatoes alone
cause a comforting commotion in their
bowels, but the temper of the bowels
is generally known to be the same as in certain
regions of the brain. We eat, we speak
down to our bowel and up to our brain,
and this produces connections, this
is the common intelligence among
the different siblings.
Later on, though, that unexplained
event occurred, the
so-called night murder,
reported in detail
by the newspapers.
The three novices, each with their own
secrets. Those two young
men who are still alive,
now fully grown, pull their
hoods up over their heads and say nothing,
They loved the third one,
they profess. He was the biggest,
but the ones who are left, too, are
almost too big, like two shadows.
In the beginning they always
ate what the others were eating.
They belonged together,
they attest.
We did, however,
we admit, kill
our parents together,
without ever being at one.
We are never at one.
Brotherliness is nonsense.
Sisterliness ambiguous.
Lovely lying sisters,
lovely to look at, the three of them,
their language distorts, contorts.
more and more, right now
their words ring bright,
iron, icily bright, they keep
at it, as a three,
I, I, I, they say,
mutually protecting one another,
the three artists
[…]
CGGA
The red-haired boy was standing in the park
again, around two o’ clock, by the hedges,
two blonde, curly-haired youths ran
up to him, a pretty girl
was with them, it was hot, the girl
hardly had anything on, and the two blonde boys leaned in briefly
towards a raw-boned, half-old man,
they read numbers off a
sheet, then the red-haired boy ran off,
ten steps forward, ten steps back,
constantly clicking his right thumb against
his sore, skinless middle finger.
The youths wanted him to calculate
the root of a dizzyingly
high number, he soon had the result
and wanted another problem,
some further entertainment, but the
teenagers ran off again.
A scrawny, hollowed-out
man, every afternoon in the park,
usually by the hedges, sometimes
surrounded by several teenagers,
girls were seldom among them, it was
mainly the boys who admired him.
Was he one of seven
siblings, or was he an
only child. I could have
imagined him as either of these,
but not as the son of a
family with two children. He
was the eldest, the youngest,
the middle one of six, seven
adolescents, or he was
always a scrawny single entity,
who ran away early on.
Potentiating, subtracting, first squaring, then adding, dividing, plucking the roots, without massaging the numbers, promptly potentiating again, adding, dividing, never stopping ever again, never stopping.
I had known the red-haired boy
for more than a year before I found out
he barely spoke any German,
that’s why he stayed silent when
there were no numbers involved, but he’d
done the maths and learned only
numbers in German, set up a clever
number chamber in his head.
It’s not certain that anyone can
see your siblings in you,
and you shouldn’t look too closely
at anyone, no one should be
looked at too closely, it’s
dangerous to look at people like that!
ATTA
Achim wrote to me about speakers, talkers, who become intimidated, so they retract their heads, which means their language cowers, too, and looks for detours, disguises. Now and again, covertly, it will try to say what matters to it, but if it doesn’t manage this, it hides itself altogether so that it can be spared, and in so doing it becomes thin, brittle, negligible.
Under good conditions, it always tries to become clearer, and the words come closer and closer to what they want to say, that’s what they want, unless they become intimidated.
But because language and speakers (all of them) live in inextricable symbiosis, there are also people involved who feel very comfortable with intentional ambiguities, complexities and equivocalities, and the phantom they produce is usually well received. This gives rise to secondary strands, secondary roads, side roads, side-tracks
[…]
I have just pared back a lot of things and tidied up (during the day I wasn’t in a very good mood, or rather, I was up and down, first I was fascinated by the term sense organs, by the organs of the senses, by the perpetually lurking sense, in the truest sense I was surrounded by the lurking sense and its scenting organs, and that’s when I thought of my wolf siblings, my big-headed brothers, and then I immediately found myself thinking about Romulus and Remus, who are also part of my early personal history, I was glad about the two of them, every wolf howls differently, I thought, which is proven and measurable, and with today’s methods we can present the differences in an intelligible way, with the senses of the individual wolves being distinguishable, whereby each wolf has its own sense and, beyond the wolves, so does everyone else. It was via this observation that I came to think, very early on a bright winter’s morning, that the shortest day would soon be overcome. Then, unfortunately, I realised that I personally hadn’t overcome anything at all, the position of the sun is the position of the sun, and things went downhill from there), tidying up helped me get a bit of an overview, but immediately another confusion arose, a commotion of raspy news reports.
As if anyone needed confusions, nowadays especially.
In all categories
paring back,
quantifying and decoding
how something started and
how it could come so far.
Backtracking, from zed
towards A, and taking your time
[…]
Lying is a cheap word, a
shrink-wrapped thing (related to
mummies), you’d do better to play with
the word ping pong, and as soon as
a lie appears you hit back,
immediately, outwit,
hit back again.
No idea who started lying at that moment. And what does moment even mean. Some fiercely defended themselves to begin with, in private anyhow, even the brother who had the affair denied everything, but at the same time, on prime time TV, official persons, too, are vigorously defending themselves against the accusation that they have told even a single syllable of a lie, they would never do that, such an accusation is a distortion, a contortion, they say, in other words a lie, and before you know it, a dizzying squirm of statements is worming its way, but nothing to do with real worms. Who on earth would want to allege that they, of all people, are wily liars, that they have a wily mind; meanwhile, the worms, if they are cut in half, live on in two bodies, and in the end, this new beginning is nothing but a clever con
[…]
♦
ZSUZSANNA GAHSE (born in 1946 in Hungary) is a German-language writer and translator who lives in Switzerland. Her publications include Nichts ist wie oder Rosa kehrt nicht zurück (1999; tr: Nothing Is Like or Rosa Is Not Coming Back), “Instabile Texte” (2005; published in English as Volatile Texts: Us Two, 2016), Erzählinseln (2009; tr: Story Islands), Südsudelbuch (2012; tr: South Waste Book). Jan, Janka, Sara und ich (2015; tr: Jan, Janka, Sara and I). Her awards include the 1993 City of Zug Prize, the 1999 Tibor-Déry-Preis, the 2004 Bodensee-Literaturpreis, the 2006 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the 2017 Italo-Svevo-Preis and the 2019 Swiss Grand Prix Literature for her life’s work.
•
MARIELLE SUTHERLAND is a freelance German-English translator. She has translated poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, a children’s novel by Michael Hanauer, literary pieces in the journals InTranslation, Alchem
Text source: Siebenundsiebzig Geschwister (Seventy-Seven Siblings), published by Edition Korrespondenzen in 2017
