Republic of Consciousness Class of 2021: A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, tr. Fionn Petch (Charco Press)
Between March 8th and March 19th we will be posting ten pieces on our blog celebrating the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 longlist. There will be interviews, extracts and articles, with each piece focussing on a longlisted book.
Today’s title is A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated by Fionn Petch and published by Charco Press. We have a double-feature: a short extract from the book entitled ‘Lullaby’ and Petch’s interview with Sagasti.
‘Lullaby’ from A Musical Offering
Where does a story end? Taking a classical viewpoint: is it when the knot has finally been untied? Though if we think about it, when a knot comes undone it is because another one is being tied. When the book closes, the Caliph and Scheherazade make love (for the first time?). Much later, gorged on happy endings, the Caliph orders her to tell him another story. She begins with the apocryphal Night, number 602: the story of the woman who must begin telling stories again. The Caliph laughs at her quick-wittedness and awaits a new story the following night. Before that can happen, Scheherazade escapes from the palace.
The Caliph, dining with some ambassadors from a distant land, has promised the guests that his wife will delight them with a marvellous story after pudding.
The two black guards glance at each other without a word as she slips out and heads into the desert. The moon is full, and her silhouette moves across the sand dunes.
Suddenly Scheherazade encounters Death, who is choosing the finest sand for his hourglass.
‘There is a moment each night, the briefest instant’, he says, without greeting or looking at her, ‘when I carry no one off. It is when I am gathering sand for my hourglass. Each grain is a star. When all the grains have passed from one side to the other, when you’ve seen all the stars you’re supposed to see, I will be waiting for you.’
‘I haven’t seen a single star for almost three years,’ says Scheherazade.
‘It’s true. Three years ago, you were on the point of seeing the last star that had been allotted to you. But you began to tell stories. Now, it’s easy. If you raise your head and gaze at the sky, you’ll come with me tonight. Otherwise, lower your head, return to your room in the palace and tell this story. Tomorrow will be another day.’
***
In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording.
In his essay on the translators of the One Thousand and One Nights, Borges enumerates at least nine. He pays particular attention to Burton’s version of 1872, as well as to the most famous and possibly worst translation, the one by French orientalist Jean Antoine Galland, who seems to have added some of the jolliest stories – Aladdin and Ali Baba – with his own hand. These additions are now part of the canon. After all, the book is like a great paella dish to which everyone has added the best they have to offer. By definition, a classic dish is not signature cuisine.
Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.
Interview
Fionn Petch: What are your first memories of writing, or what did writing first mean to you?
Luis Sagasti: I wrote my first book when I was 5 years old. I wrote micro stories, I made comics. The first thing that prompted me to write was when I was given an encyclopaedia called I Know Everything – an extraordinary title! Like The Aleph… It wasn’t the kind used for school, it was too informal. There was no order to it: an article on the Milky Way would be followed by one on sausages, another on giant pandas, and so on. I’d generally only read the captions to the images. But it fascinated me. So at the age of 5 or 6 – I knew how to write before I started school – I told my mother I was going to create my own encyclopaedia. Just like that. This must have been 1970, because I drew the goals from the World Cup final between Brazil and Italy. Then I started on comics when I was in 3rd grade or so. In high school I got interested in basketball and in girls – without much success in either – and found a new drive to write in my final year when I began reading more serious literature: Graham Greene, Henry Miller… I embarked on a kind of bohemian phase. At that time the dictatorship was weakening. I had this urge to write, but of course I had no experience of life! I was just 17. I didn’t have anything to write about. I was definitely not Rimbaud.
FP: Your work encompasses a range of styles, but the two books I’ve translated share a fragmentary narrative, with short sections that thread together different stories and characters, who are mostly historical figures, often artists and musicians. How did you arrive at this narrative style?
LS: I have a particular way of being in the world that is expressed differently when I teach and when I write. My students often ask me ‘but what is this course that you’re teaching us?’ They always complain that I leave the track and head off into the wilds. But I respond that this is because there are so many paths to explore. And rambling the byways leads me to ideas that go into the books. I’ll ask a student to note something down, I dictate it and I take it home. Both in writing and in teaching, when you flow without thinking too much, when you’re playing jazz, things come out. At a different level, it’s a Keith Jarrett concert. It’s not a deliberate decision to use fragments. Once I found this style, though, perfecting it is another question.
FP: This mode of writing seems like it could proliferate indefinitely, as you uncover connections and coincidences between events and characters. How do you go about containing all this flood of material, editing and rejecting to create these more or less slender books? (Though they are so dense that I’m always surprised when I go back to them and realize how much is in just a few pages: they are like a very high-proof distillation…)
LS: I think there’s a point where you feel it’s done. I don’t say to myself, oh, we need another chapter on this or that. Not at all. I feel it’s ready. Even if some detail comes along that would fit, I say to myself we’ve reached a point and that’s enough. If you try to put everything in, it’s like a dish that is ready to eat but you keep adding more and more ingredients. With Fireflies I kept coming across yet more stories of people plummeting to earth in different ways, but it risked turning into a series of Lost in Space. You risk losing the text’s poetic depth. The word you used – distillation (how Scottish of you!) – is not one I’d thought of but it’s spot on. They are short books. I aim for a certain minimum length, and try not to force things. It’s a bit like with relationships: sometimes they come to a natural end.
FP: You live in Bahía Blanca, a city in the far south of Buenos Aires Province, at the edge of Patagonia. Do you see any relationship between your work and Argentina’s geographical situation in the world, or with your situation within Argentina?
LS: There’s an essay by Borges, ‘The Argentine writer and tradition’, that’s useful for explaining this. Unlike other writers, we don’t feel the weight of tradition. So, we write about anything we like. I’m not going to compare myself to Borges, of course. But he wrote about characters or geographies from wherever he liked. And this is something quite particular to us. We don’t have this sense of the weight of the ancestors, of the genealogy that I feel you do in Europe. I see that in British rock music too: the melodies come from the Elizabethan age. You listen to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Yesterday’ and the melodies date back to the 16th or 17th century! Here, as a peripheral country in so many respects, we don’t have that superstition.
Now, Bahía Blanca with respect to Buenos Aires is a little bit like Buenos Aires with regard to the rest of the world. In fact, here in Bahía there’s been a real revolution in poetry. Sergio Raymundo and Mario Ortiz are poets who created a rupture with the poetry of Hispanic America. Why? Because you’re far from Buenos Aires. You don’t have that aspect of daily life – especially when I began writing, it’s a bit different now with social networks – of the pressure of literary groups and coteries. I’d go to Buenos Aires three or four times a year and I felt there was a pressure to compete as a writer, to see who gets published in which cultural supplement. From afar that all seemed tiresome. Within my generation, however, I think I may have been the first prose writer to be published in Buenos Aires without living there. I’m talking about twenty years ago, it’s different now. I love going for a few days at a time. It’s like London, or Paris. But I couldn’t imagine living there.
FP: I read that you like to go running a lot, while listening to music. You said running is like a kind of dancing, I think? Are you thinking about your texts while you run?
LS: Yes, running is like dancing in a straight line. And doing it without music is the height of stupidity, because otherwise the soundtrack is just the sound of your own panting. I always choose a playlist that stimulates me to run. Generally rock, British rock. Running makes me very happy. At first it causes a kind of metaphysical crisis, but once I get into my rhythm I stop asking myself what the hell I’m doing. No, I don’t think about my texts. That’s for when I go walking.
FP: So do you listen to music when you’re working?
LS: No, I can’t. I need silence. Only if I need to look up a specific musical reference, say. But otherwise I’d be too focused on the music to be able to write. I’d much prefer to listen to Lennon than think about whatever nonsense I’m writing!
FP: Speaking of silence, A Musical Offering is a book that we could summarise by saying it is about silences in music. Someone once said ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’– no one seems to know who said it first. In A Musical Offering you evoke the experience of listening to music both in the rhythm of the sentences and in exploring the effects it has on your characters. So do you think it is in fact possible to explain one kind of art through another? Or is that something we must remain silent about, as Wittgenstein might say?
LS: Well, firstly, that phrase has been attributed to everyone. Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. Who knows. I think that, yes, up to a certain point you can approach a different artistic language through writing. Otherwise, how could we write anything at all? About painting, about any kind of experience. Can experiences be reduced to language? Perhaps not. But it’s all we’ve got. It’s like with translation. People say that nothing is translatable, that it’s always a betrayal of the original. Get out of here! I’d rather read a half-decent translation of Tolstoy than not read him at all. Sure, it’s not Tolstoy, but it’s close enough.
Now, with regard to music, we can have descriptions, approaches, essays. But what interests me is the possibility of bringing into language, into the sentence, the rhythm of music itself. I ask myself: can I carry over the tempo – or even the counterpoint – of Bach into narrative form? Not necessarily in order to write about Bach, that might be rather redundant. But I think there are certain modes that do come across. For example, I had the idea of writing a book without using the word ‘que’ (that/what/which). You’ve heard of the Argentinian rock musician Charly García, right? He’s a bit of a Bowie figure here. Very erudite. He once observed this about The Beatles: in their early songs they never play the third note in a chord. In the chord Do-Mi-Sol, for instance, they don’t play the Mi, which would determine if it was a major or minor chord. But somewhere we always want to put it back in. So I wondered if I could do something similar, to remove the third note, as it were, from a sentence: the conjunction ‘que’. But do it in such a way that nobody would even notice it was missing. It’s not about showing off with formal games, Oulipo-style; rather, it’s about finding a different rhythm of writing.
FP: So is this something you’re working on at the moment?
LS: Well, it’s connected with a very curious story I heard about a ghost writer, which led me to someone who comes across Heidegger’s Being in an abandoned barn, and to a man who can’t stop coughing during a performance of Mahler’s Ninth, but described as if it were Aschenbach dying at the end of Death in Venice. But we won’t go into that right now… At the moment, I’m completing a novel – if we can call it that – one that follows in a similar line to A Musical Offering and Fireflies. It’s about the last speakers of dying languages, the chromatic deterioration of paintings, and the formal beauty of alphabets that no one has deciphered, among other things. It’s almost ready.
A Musical Offering is available to buy on the Charco Press website.