Where Was the Angel Going?

Introduction-3

But whereas children can be mentors, calling childish adults back to order, for this very reason they should not be disabused of their innocence, deprived of their simple ideals of right and wrong, by relativising adults. Morality — like it or not! — should be as ironclad as grammar, thinks Eva’s professional grandfather, heartbroken at his granddaughter’s deprivation of stable development by parents who put their own comfort and pleasure before her good. When his wife objects to his strict moral tutelage of the little girl, our hearts are first on her side. Let the girl have as normal a childhood as possible. Don’t torment her! we nod. And yet, it is difficult not to see his side of the argument:

‘You’re messing up that little girl’s head with adult problems,’ his wife would chide him when little Eva didn’t know where to rest her eyes, at each mention of her parents.

‘They’ve already messed up her head with adult problems,’ the old man shot back. ‘I’m setting forth examples, you understand, Olinka, examples that someday she’ll be able to grasp. So that she’ll know that in every sentence there has to be…’

[…]

Because it still holds true, even now, that a proper sentence has subject, predicate, and object, right? And each proper family has father, mother, and child. Or not? Maybe that doesn’t apply anymore? the old man seethed, then, brimming with love, he looked down at the small curly head of his granddaughter (24).

However much the modern world might want to inveigh against this sort of attitude, it bears fruit in the life of Eva. Having become pregnant by a man who took pleasure in ‘demeaning’ her, she still, in the end, decides to keep the child, and does so, with a sudden uprush of warmth at the recollection of her grandfather’s ‘soft heroism […] that whole courageous game with life as its stakes, that game with the suppressed subject.’

We may be surprised at that phrase, ‘soft heroism.’ In our way of looking at things, the old professor may have subjected his granddaughter to a rather harsh didacticism, but it was not empty pedantry. Even if it hurt her to realise that her parents were acting wrongly, better that pain now, than poisonous servings of sugared moral indifference. This much at least is required by Christian honesty. As we know, or should know, not even Pope or Patriarch can conscience immorality for dubiously pastoral reasons. And in this case — it saves a life.

With man’s expulsion from Eden, time begins. The clock starts ticking with the first sin. And yet, Martin’s expulsion from Eden fixes him in the moment of his fall:

As Zeno of Elea proved long ago, the arrow shot from its bow does not fly, but, rather, is stationary in each segment of its route. Because the same arrow can’t be in two places at once. No more could Martin, and so he remains there, in that one shattering moment, shirtless at the culm bank, with his stomach lifting and his eyes gazing round at the empty reaches of the surrounding world, which he must, now, take for his own. (6)

‘Stunned’ is perhaps a better word than ‘fixed’ — as at the moment of his particular fall, Martin finds himself faced with the new, inimical world that he must enter. From this moment on, Martin is in the position of the first Europeans in California (and of Europeans first in California), gazing at what must now be conquered, since it has been seen, to paraphrase Czesław Miłosz. He must now set off into that land, like it or not. As in the case of old Adam, Eva has made the decision for him.

Still, in a curious sense, Martin will ever remain in that moment, at once Edenic and infernal, standing at the lip of paradise, ‘in the subsequent vacuum created by her absence [when] he could still feel the aura of her body on his face, still taste her saliva in his mouth’ (2) but facing the imminent exit, in that horrible pause between the nearness of just-passed delight and the rough thump of the angel’s hand between the shoulder-blades that will send him packing.

Eva will always remain with him — as Monika notes, referring to her as ‘your mysterious Eva, whom you never stopped loving despite your marriage’ (36) — to whom he was ‘unfaithful’ (44), even though it was she who had broken with him. Martin, it seems, is the one who ‘betrayed’ her the first time his eyes wandered to another woman. Eva is Martin’s donna ideale, his Beatrice, and while she does not upbraid him in London for his ‘infidelity’ as the Florentine girl does Dante, when he finally meets her again in Purgatory, Monika does it for her, here.

Now Purgatory is also a place subject, in a certain sense, to time, while more than once, Balabán refers to eternal states in his record of the history of Martin Vrána:

In a tunnel, time means nothing. The moment when total darkness falls is the last moment, and others such follow, until the greyish mould of light appears in the window frames. The eternity between that moment and this is a slate wiped clean, which has different dimensions and parameters than events in time upon which the light of the sun falls (13).

Hell is eternal; one of the most moving — and frightening — parts of the Inferno is in Canto X when Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti explains to the pilgrim that, whereas the damned are aware of both the past and the future, knowledge of the present moment is denied them. Thus, when time ends, when the last soul in Purgatory has been received into Heaven and nothing shall remain but Heaven and Hell, the sufferings of the damned will be augmented by the total eclipse of their rational mind. In that now eternal present moment, no consciousness will remain them but that of their suffering; they will be locked eternally within the sin for which they were condemned.3

Such, however, is not the case with Martin. His frequent musings on eternity, reality, and absence tend in an affirmative direction — towards the Christian Neoplatonic idea of the mind of God, in which all things, even those hidden from us, are acknowledged and present. This is the sense of his brother Tomáš’s ‘broadcasting’ of his photographic negatives into the seemingly empty spaces of the galaxies above Ostrava, and Martin’s comforting reassurance of the simple cave-paintings of men, with which he, his brother, and their friend covered the interior of an abandoned mine-shaft. Even though the vault collapsed one day, denying them further access, ‘the pigments evoking the outlines of people are still there in the darkness, invisible due to the lack of light, but still there all the same. You can believe me or not, as you like. I can’t prove it’ (20).

This segment of the book inevitably leads us back to the prehistoric fresco, which Martin sketches on the wall of his flat:

On one side of the wall he drew a man. He was naked, but set in motion in such a way that his private parts were hidden. One of his hands was stretched out before him, as if he wanted to touch something. I’ll paint over it in a minute, anyway, Martin reassured himself, and started to work on the woman. She was standing on the other side, looking out from the plane of the wall on which she was painted. She had a beautiful behind and breasts, and her long hair fell about her face. Children were playing between them, building some structures from flat stones. They were naked too, a little boy and a little girl; engrossed in their game, they weren’t looking at each other. Just like the office of a child psychologist, Martin chuckled, shading the design and happily planning the background he would carve out behind them. Gigantic trees — not a pine forest, but ancient growth. (18).

This is also a cave-painting of a sort, and the primaeval setting with which he endows it also has an Edenic eloquence. His life with Daniela and the kids seems to have had little of the paradisiacal about it, yet this too is significant in its exposition of Martin’s key trait: regret, sadness at the passing of anything good; goodness itself, however brief or trifling its appearance here, is always a reflection of prelapsarian bliss. Even as a child he had this trait, as his mother reminisces:

Martin, Martin the lefty, who always glances aside somewhat, playing with something the other two can’t see. He’s always got something stashed away somewhere. And won’t show anyone. He’d rather stand there, teeth clenched, with something gripped in his left hand, and should Tomáš try to pry those fingers open, he’ll kick and bite in a furious whirl to keep it hidden (14).

This is not some morbidly selfish petulance, it is an image of Adam tenaciously gripping the edge of Eden with his fingernails.

Finally, Where Was the Angel Going? is an elegy for the most important thing in the world — not the individual, but the coming together in complete trust and support of two people. Martin and Eva, Adam and Eve, whatever it is that comes between them and breaks them apart indeed precipitates an expulsion from Paradise. Balabán is firmly set in the Biblical tradition, following which Milton correctly shows that the devil was only able to gain his brief victory over humanity by first separating Adam and Eve, to conquer them — a thought reprised by Jan Zahradníček in Znamení moci [Sign of Power], where it is the devil’s modern helpers who do the same thing in post-war Czechoslovakia by breaking down the bonds between people; and Eliot, who underscores in his great dramas that isolation is the foundational characteristic of Hell, of damnation. However, in the final coming together of Martin and Monika, Balabán brings his little gospel full cycle by intimating a fresh beginning — the renewal of all things at the end of time. Not unlike the vision with which Dante returns to earth after his awe-inspiring journey, Balabán’s novel shows us that this world is not an absurdly incomprehensible scattering of Sybil’s leaves, but a book, bound together by Love.

On translating Jan Balabán

Literary translation is always a curious endeavour leading to curious results. It is both something obvious — for many years, the Anglophone world has been indebted to Constance Garnett for her magnificent translations of Dostoevsky, which have enabled the great Russian to reach, and influence, millions of people who know no Russian at all — and misunderstood, as something mechanical. Now, English speakers may chuckle at the German bon mot: ‘Shakespeare is a fantastic poet. It’s a shame the English can’t read him in German,’ but the phrase, as ironic as it may sound, contains more than a kernel of truth. Schlegel’s versions of Shakespeare in German are of such high poetic quality that a seemingly heretical statement suggesting that they are even an improvement on the original is, at the very least, theoretically admissible.

The one thing that can be said with certainty is: each translation is an original work, in its own right. That sounds like an unforgivably prideful thing to say, depreciating, if not dismissing, the original and its author. However, my intent is just the opposite. In claiming the present translation as ‘my own’ writing, I do not mean to blur or downplay its nature as that strangest beast of literary endeavours, translation, which is a ‘new’ creation that, all the same, would never have seen the light of day without the previous existence of the original work that it represents in English. What I wish to do is accept the blame for all its faults and roughnesses — I am their sole perpetrator; Jan Balabán had nothing to do with them.

Kudy šel anděl is a beautiful and fascinating work of literary art in the original Czech. This is the very reason I wished to recreate it in English. Every act of literary translation should be an act of love, and this, my Where Was the Angel Going? is certainly that, if nothing else.