MUSINGS: When the Internet died during Hurricane Laura

 

Without the Internet—surprise!—much that one takes for granted in everyday life goes swoosh. The major things are obvious, but it’s the small, niggling things that come as a shock. Like…I wanted to write this on my computer where I have the choice of Word, Pages, and Google docs. But I can’t! All of these programs are online, and I am not! To the rescue? Text Edit, that long forgotten remnant of a prior age, but (thank you, Apple) still available and perfectly functional.

 

Why did I want to write? Well, I am tired of the hesitant, stuttering connectivity of weak cellular networks delivering (or not) tweets and texts and maybe email. I want something that has flow! A few minutes ago, my eye fell on Elias Canetti’s, The Voices of Marrakesh; I’d pulled it off the shelf to reread the opening story, Encounters with Camels, deeply and powerfully disturbing each and every time. But this time it put me in mind of something else Canetti had done. Years ago I had landed in Zurich on a flight from New York, napped for a few hours in the small apartment in the Storchengasse I then rented as a pied-à-terre, and once awake went over to visit my friend Henriette who lived nearby. We were chatting when her phone rang, and while she was on the call, I went over to look at her bookshelves. I pulled out a slim paperback volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets and—as the call appeared to be lengthy—sat back down to read.

 

It was a translation: English text on one page, German on the facing page. And it was godawful! Stilted, lacking in music, in poetry, and in flow. There must be something better, I thought, and went a-searching. Turns out there are quite a few translations of the sonnets into German, but none I found that was—at least to my ear—totally satisfactory. The Viennese essayist, Karl Krauss, caught the emotional content well in a Nachdichtung—a poetic translation—but that was his poetry, not Shakespeare’s. And then I ran across Canetti’s version: lovely, engrossing, and quite marvelous. Somehow his native Bulgarian, English from his childhood and later years, and German from his years in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, all come together in these translations. They are, as has been said of his essays, immaculately crafted.

 

If you love the sonnets, and possess German, hunt up a copy! You will be charmed.

 

 

New Milford, CT

27 August 2020

 

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