River Boat Books' Skulls of Istria gets a new review--
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1RickHarsch
Not published, not by a member of Lt, so here:
Skulls of Istria,
River Boat Books (2018)
Rick Harsch
It begins as a seemingly aimless chat between two men in a bar taking shelter from the burja (bora) wind. One disgraced American historian with an overwhelming need to talk driven by bottle after bottle of Viljamovka, and the other, presumably a Slovene, simply taking in the stream of booze and words and keeping his uncomprehending silence through the swells and sweeps of both the recent horrors of the Balkan atrocities as well as the ancient terrors whose evidence continues to be encountered in the skulls and debris that will not disappear. This movement, this apparent unburdening of guilt, love, passion, more guilt and self-loathing, unfolds through the telling of one betrayed friendship and two connected love-affairs, through escape and death, to the final pages which reveal the underlying structure of a work that was deceptively free-moving and associative at its surface level.
It is in his associative use of language, echoes of assonance that seem too good to ignore, puns as self-indulgent as a drunken confessor in their reach for connections whether semantic or phonetic, that the spirit of Joyce appears in Harsch’s style. The playfulness in the language draws the reader into following signifiers and associations into labyrinthine pleasures, through ancient myth, historical warfare, sexual passion – and the pure pleasure of the chase.
Of course, Harsch’s geographical positioning in Istria, the Adriatic peninsula shared by the three countries of Slovenia, Croatia and Italy, and within spitting distance of Trieste and Venice, places him within the same linguistic hunting ground as James Joyce which makes the connection between the writers even more evident. Umberto Eco in his fascination with Joyce described him as the true modernist, as the remover of the rational mental structures derived from the medieval summae, and also of the eradication of the ‘well-made plot’ which maintains that each action in a novel is either meaningful with respect to the final denouement, or else is “stupid”. But, as Eco said, “with Joyce we have the full acceptance of all the stupid acts of daily life as narrative material” (39) - and with Harsch also.
We are swept along with these ‘stupid’ acts of daily life driven by sexual attraction, emotional attachment, guilt and pain – as well as the even more stupid and senseless acts of power and domination, destruction and shame that shaped the lives and deaths of too many in the Balkans – and as the short novel seems to be carried forward with an almost burja-driven force, seemingly with no deeper plan, aim or structure than the chase of passion and language - the novel in a few short pages in the final chapter, draws all strings together, all points of view into one overwhelming understanding that there was a point, a direction, a structure and the underlying decision of all story-tellers in love with language and the patterns of memory - to ‘tell a tale’. And to go back to Eco’s description of Finnegan’s Wake that “to create the impression of a complete lack of structure, a work of art must possess a strong underlying structure” and “a cunningly organized network of mutual relationships.” (67)
Harsch’s Joycean inability to ignore the underpull of words, together with the location of his tale, clearly invite parallels. However, there is also a strong undercurrent in the rhythm of the prose and the subdued music of the language that recall another of his modernist compatriots fled to Europe, T.S. Eliot and his persistent vision of a dry wasteland on the borders of a river. Those souls of the dead, undone, and moving to the unseeing and uncaring bells of St Mary Woolnoth calling to all in a Dantesque nightmare of soulessness. The rivers of blood, the heads on pikes, the senseless slaughter in the wake of nationalist politics, and the highest disregard for human life at the core of the very essence of this Balkan journey unfolding through three bottles of potent pear brandy create another wasteland of human barbarity. The historian-narrator takes the tale deep into the underworld of depravity to re-emerge from the depths of Hades, Orpheus-like, telling his tale and unable to keep entirely within the rules of the game.
Clearly this journey, this short novel with its dense surface associations of sounds, rhythms and signifiers could either be a translator’s nightmare – or else a fascinating game of re-creation and re-writing pushing the rules of literary translation to the edge.
Clare Vassallo, Translator and
Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies, University of Malta.
February 2018.
Quotations from:
The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, trans. Ellen Esrock, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.
Skulls of Istria,
River Boat Books (2018)
Rick Harsch
It begins as a seemingly aimless chat between two men in a bar taking shelter from the burja (bora) wind. One disgraced American historian with an overwhelming need to talk driven by bottle after bottle of Viljamovka, and the other, presumably a Slovene, simply taking in the stream of booze and words and keeping his uncomprehending silence through the swells and sweeps of both the recent horrors of the Balkan atrocities as well as the ancient terrors whose evidence continues to be encountered in the skulls and debris that will not disappear. This movement, this apparent unburdening of guilt, love, passion, more guilt and self-loathing, unfolds through the telling of one betrayed friendship and two connected love-affairs, through escape and death, to the final pages which reveal the underlying structure of a work that was deceptively free-moving and associative at its surface level.
It is in his associative use of language, echoes of assonance that seem too good to ignore, puns as self-indulgent as a drunken confessor in their reach for connections whether semantic or phonetic, that the spirit of Joyce appears in Harsch’s style. The playfulness in the language draws the reader into following signifiers and associations into labyrinthine pleasures, through ancient myth, historical warfare, sexual passion – and the pure pleasure of the chase.
Of course, Harsch’s geographical positioning in Istria, the Adriatic peninsula shared by the three countries of Slovenia, Croatia and Italy, and within spitting distance of Trieste and Venice, places him within the same linguistic hunting ground as James Joyce which makes the connection between the writers even more evident. Umberto Eco in his fascination with Joyce described him as the true modernist, as the remover of the rational mental structures derived from the medieval summae, and also of the eradication of the ‘well-made plot’ which maintains that each action in a novel is either meaningful with respect to the final denouement, or else is “stupid”. But, as Eco said, “with Joyce we have the full acceptance of all the stupid acts of daily life as narrative material” (39) - and with Harsch also.
We are swept along with these ‘stupid’ acts of daily life driven by sexual attraction, emotional attachment, guilt and pain – as well as the even more stupid and senseless acts of power and domination, destruction and shame that shaped the lives and deaths of too many in the Balkans – and as the short novel seems to be carried forward with an almost burja-driven force, seemingly with no deeper plan, aim or structure than the chase of passion and language - the novel in a few short pages in the final chapter, draws all strings together, all points of view into one overwhelming understanding that there was a point, a direction, a structure and the underlying decision of all story-tellers in love with language and the patterns of memory - to ‘tell a tale’. And to go back to Eco’s description of Finnegan’s Wake that “to create the impression of a complete lack of structure, a work of art must possess a strong underlying structure” and “a cunningly organized network of mutual relationships.” (67)
Harsch’s Joycean inability to ignore the underpull of words, together with the location of his tale, clearly invite parallels. However, there is also a strong undercurrent in the rhythm of the prose and the subdued music of the language that recall another of his modernist compatriots fled to Europe, T.S. Eliot and his persistent vision of a dry wasteland on the borders of a river. Those souls of the dead, undone, and moving to the unseeing and uncaring bells of St Mary Woolnoth calling to all in a Dantesque nightmare of soulessness. The rivers of blood, the heads on pikes, the senseless slaughter in the wake of nationalist politics, and the highest disregard for human life at the core of the very essence of this Balkan journey unfolding through three bottles of potent pear brandy create another wasteland of human barbarity. The historian-narrator takes the tale deep into the underworld of depravity to re-emerge from the depths of Hades, Orpheus-like, telling his tale and unable to keep entirely within the rules of the game.
Clearly this journey, this short novel with its dense surface associations of sounds, rhythms and signifiers could either be a translator’s nightmare – or else a fascinating game of re-creation and re-writing pushing the rules of literary translation to the edge.
Clare Vassallo, Translator and
Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies, University of Malta.
February 2018.
Quotations from:
The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, trans. Ellen Esrock, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.
2PeterDamianBellis
Her review will be the introduction to the next printing of Skulls. And just so you know who Clare Vassallo is; here is her bio; fantastic, I mean she worked with Umberto Eco.
A graduate of Philosophy, Linguistics and English Literature, Clare Vassallo pursued her interest in the interface of these three areas at the Istituto di Comunicazione, University of Bologna, Italy where she obtained her Ph.D in Semiotics under the tutorship of Prof. Umberto Eco. The emphasis of her research was in the field of Semiotics as literary and cultural theory and as theory of knowledge.
She is currently Associate Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies in the Department of Translation Studies at the University of Malta. She teaches postgraduate courses in the Department of Translation Studies and in the MA Program on Popular Culture and Literary Tradition. Her courses include Translation History and Theory; Pragmatics, Semantics and Semiotics; Literary Translation; among others.
Her professional experience includes a two year appointment as Chairman of the Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) for National Television and Radio between 2008-2010, and concurrently as Chair of the Eurovision Song Contest. She previously served as a member of the PBS Board of Directors from 2000-2003, and 2007-2008.
She was appointed Judge for the National Book Prize 2010, 2011 and 2012, and has been both Judge and Chair of the Panel for the Malta Press Club Award to Journalists (IGM), the Gold Award and the Award for Travel Journalism.
She guest edited a Special Issue of the journal Semiotica, titled Umberto Eco’s Interpretative Semiotics: Interpretation, Encyclopedia, Translation, De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, vol. 206, issue 1/4. Her focus is currently in literary translation and she’s just translated Pierre Mejlak and Trevor Zahra’s short stories from Maltese (both published by Merlin Books, Malta).
A graduate of Philosophy, Linguistics and English Literature, Clare Vassallo pursued her interest in the interface of these three areas at the Istituto di Comunicazione, University of Bologna, Italy where she obtained her Ph.D in Semiotics under the tutorship of Prof. Umberto Eco. The emphasis of her research was in the field of Semiotics as literary and cultural theory and as theory of knowledge.
She is currently Associate Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies in the Department of Translation Studies at the University of Malta. She teaches postgraduate courses in the Department of Translation Studies and in the MA Program on Popular Culture and Literary Tradition. Her courses include Translation History and Theory; Pragmatics, Semantics and Semiotics; Literary Translation; among others.
Her professional experience includes a two year appointment as Chairman of the Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) for National Television and Radio between 2008-2010, and concurrently as Chair of the Eurovision Song Contest. She previously served as a member of the PBS Board of Directors from 2000-2003, and 2007-2008.
She was appointed Judge for the National Book Prize 2010, 2011 and 2012, and has been both Judge and Chair of the Panel for the Malta Press Club Award to Journalists (IGM), the Gold Award and the Award for Travel Journalism.
She guest edited a Special Issue of the journal Semiotica, titled Umberto Eco’s Interpretative Semiotics: Interpretation, Encyclopedia, Translation, De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, vol. 206, issue 1/4. Her focus is currently in literary translation and she’s just translated Pierre Mejlak and Trevor Zahra’s short stories from Maltese (both published by Merlin Books, Malta).
