What would the stones not have to tell if only someone would listen to them. How the “tap-tap” of the animals lulls them to sleep night after night. How they trembled when shells fell during the civil war. Or how, much earlier, they soared up to the sky, “tons of rock and earth, granite, gneiss and calcite”, folded to form a mountain range.
The mountains whose rocks tell the story in Irene Solà’s novel “I sing, the mountains dance” are the Pyrenees. The Catalan author makes them speak in a very special way and thus creates a nature poem in her novel that is unparalleled in contemporary European literature.
Making stones weep has been a dream of poetry since Orpheus. With Irene Solà, it is not only the stones that feel and tell stories, but also clouds, death trumpets, mermaids, deer and dogs. They don’t necessarily speak to each other, but they do speak to the readers. With Solà, each stanza of this many-voiced song has its own melody and a different beat, giving it a coherent poetry. Together, the verses create a song that tells of life on the barren slopes of the Spanish Pyrenees and takes you to other levels of reality. Very real and magical at the same time.
She brings stones, clouds and deer to tell stories: the Catalan nature poet Irene Solá
Solà’s novel, which consists of 18 individual narrative threads that gradually weave into a carpet, begins with the speech of the clouds: “We came with full bellies. Bulging. Black bodies, heavy with dark, cold water and thunder and lightning . We came from the sea and from other mountains and from who knows where else and had seen who knows what.”
And the way the clouds tell stories, about the lightning that they send into the head of a farmer, and about the snails, of which they drown a handful without really wanting to, the novel unfolds a pull right from the first pages that almost 200 pages later it still hasn’t let up.
“I sing, dance the mountains” is Solà’s second novel and the first to be published in German. The language of animals and allegedly inanimate nature, this special form of literary pathos, has already occupied the author in her first two works, the volume of poems “Bèstia” and her debut “Els dics”. The mosaic-like narration is just as much part of the style that the author, who was born in 1990, developed with her first works as the special rhythm of her language: the sentences are short but not choppy because they are connected by a legato that is made up of repetitions and changes of meter only arises.
A water woman who hears nature speak is pursued as a witch
After the first chapter the clouds move on, limp, empty and spent. They just leave the person they killed. The waterwomen will soon find him, as midwives and witches they are the bridge between the worlds of humans, animals and legends. One of these water women tells of the torture they put her through, the “piss-stinking rooms”, the “long, long ropes” and the “woolen rags full of ash”, but above all the “waiting for me to finally stopped laughing and confessed”. She was persecuted, mistreated and imprisoned as a witch. She is one of the few clairvoyant and therefore knows that nature can speak. It is this clairvoyance that Solà’s novel draws on.
Thanks to the translation by Petra Zickmann, the novel, which is published with great commitment by the small Trabanten publishing house, which was only recently founded in Berlin, uses its simple yet powerful language in German. She carefully transferred the sound of this often harsh mountain language from Catalan to German and fortunately preserved its harshness.
“Inside we weren’t wet. Inside we were dark and warm. Outside we were wet. And the eyes didn’t know what seeing was because they had never seen. Inside everything was dark and they didn’t know they were meant to see served. Eyelids closed, resting. Outside we were wet, and the air told us we were wet. You are wet, you are wet, she said. And the cold was exasperating. And Mama came with a tongue that was warm as the memories. With a tongue licking up fear and blood.”
Irene Solà: When I sing, the mountains dance. Novel. Trabanten Verlag, Berlin 2022. 207 pages, 22 euros.
A young roebuck tells the story of the moment he was born. Have you already read something like this? “Fox 8” by George Saunders comes to mind, where a fox has learned the human language and tells about his fight against the construction of a shopping center. But what Saunders turns into a fable about modern civilization is, with Irene Solà, a very own coherent cosmos. Here the animals do not speak to teach humans a lesson. Her speech is not just a rehash of the old battle of nature versus culture. It is self-sufficient, is enough for itself.
Solà says she finds the inspiration for her writing primarily in Catalan legends and in the stories of her homeland. She grew up in a tiny village 50 kilometers from the Spanish-French border. In “empty Spain”, which demographers have been attesting a hopeless future for years.
Solà’s stuff is old and worn, you might think. But the author found such a unique, unusual form for it that the Spanish literary world was beside itself for months after the publication of “Sing I, Dance the Mountains”. Literary criticism found this language and the layers and stories that Solà dug out of the rocks of the Pyrenees slopes in her literary-geological work unheard of.
Now this novel can finally become an experience for a German-speaking audience. Many readers are to be wished for him – and many readers are to be wished that they discover him. Because “I sing, the mountains dance” gives comfort when reading, without being kitschy. In a simple and beautiful way, the novel tells of the important insight that people should not take themselves too seriously.