While the fashion of the 1990s has been experiencing a revival for some time, the same cannot be said for the literary postmodern. Self-referential plot structures, metafiction towers, inflated intertextuality – all of this has somehow aged badly. At the same time, and this cannot be denied, the autofictional memoir experiments of recent years are inconceivable without these formal innovations. So what remains of this letter today?
This question can also be put to the test of the work of the Norwegian poet, novelist, essayist and translator Svein Jarvoll. In addition to the translations, including by Sappho and Antilochos, Jarvoll’s work is relatively narrow: He made his debut in 1984 with the long poem “Thanatos. A polyphonic poem about death”, four years later his only novel “Eine Australienreise” was published in Norway) and heralded literary postmodernism there: The experimental text consists of two converging, but rather loosely connected parts that tell in a fragmentary way about everything possible.
After “Eine Australienreise” and “Thanatos” in a translation by Matthias Friedrich were published by Urs Engeler last year, Jarvoll’s “Melbourne Lectures” are now also available in German for the first time. It is about a writer who bears the author’s name, lives in Northern Norway, and is supposed to give two lectures on his special topic at the Victoria Writer’s Center in Melbourne: labyrinthology.
The narrator does not get very far, but ponders the mystery of writing
Nevertheless, the “Melbourne Lectures” are neither a poetics lecture nor a travelogue. Although the lecturer travels to Alexandria to walk in the footsteps of the Greek poet Konstantionos Kavafis, the rambling fascination for the out-of-the-way, incidental and obscure prevents the journey and the story from proceeding. Jarvoll himself describes the collection of essays “The Melbourne Lectures” in the foreword as “disformal” and himself as “poor laboratory technician” who “patted around his own labyrinths in repeated confusions and confused repetitions”.
The Latschende has a system: the “library rat Jarvoll” doesn’t get very far and doesn’t even want to: he much prefers to ponder the “mystery of writing”, the effect of rhetorical figures and remembers being in one of the most beautiful passages in the book Autodidactic study of Greek: during the shift work in a chocolate factory, the unskilled worker jarvoll crams grammar and since then the association of Homer and dark chocolate has not gotten rid of, forever “Greek is associated with the smell of chocolate, half sweet, half bitter, so that every sweetness Has a shadow of bitterness, bittersweet is a Janus word, the hardness and bitterness of the cocoa bean, the orchestral sweetness of a jelly truffle, it melts in the mouth until the mouth melts completely. “
The labyrinthine is not only Jarvoll’s theme, but also a formal program: the paths and branches of his thought processes seem to get closer and closer over time, more and more detoured, darker and more remote – it takes a little at first to create a provisional overview only to be at a crossroads of various topics after a few pages.
Jarvoll’s acrobatic excesses of description develop their own charisma in German
The sometimes very scholastic dryness of Jarvoll’s Windungen und Wendungen appears almost playful and fresh in Matthias Friedrich’s brilliant translation, without the difficulty of the original being hidden or smoothed out. Friedrich’s crystalline and witty translation not only depicts Jarvoll’s labyrinths, but every now and then builds side roads, finds escape routes from the seriousness postmodern self-adulation.
This becomes particularly clear on the basis of Jarvoll’s acrobatic excesses of description, which develop a radiance of their own in Friedrich’s translation: “The piss-yellow ice humps with which the mountain ledges were armored gave off an oily smoothness under the scorching sun, and one or two high-sounding drops fell under them iridescent egg-cone organ pipes that hung in heavy clusters in front of the rock caves, the silty trample snow melted into elephant tracks in the winter-colored grass, and quick water – sparkling, flowing, trickling, seeing, winding – was woven over the entire mountain side, from the visible, but not individually audible At the uppermost point on the edge of the valley floor, brooks stumble their light threads together, at the valley floor, where the dark, broad band of the river Bardu, strangely untouched by everything, sailed on a steady course towards the sea. “
For the beauty of such views alone, it is worth crossing Jarvoll’s Intertextuality Mountains, wandering through the labyrinths a bit misplaced – but you won’t get very far with platform shoes and a training jacket, sturdy shoes are certainly recommended.