AN EVENING WITH HERTA MULLER (18.08.07)

Bernhardt

Herta Muller is one of the most appreciated writers in Germany. She has represented Germany on shortlists for the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in Romania, in the Swabian community in the Banat region in the west. She pursued German language and culture studies in Timisoara, and then took up a job as a translator in a car factory. Muller’s refusal to collaborate with the Securitate secret police led her to lose her job, and she earned a living by giving private German lessons, before emigrating to West Germany in 1987.

Since her literary debut in 1982, Herta Muller has published more than 20 books which have been translated into many languages. Virtually every year has brought her an important literary award, such as ‘Ricarda Huch’, ‘Kleist’, ‘Joseph Breitbach’ and the ‘IMPAC Dublin Literary Award’. Many newspapers columns have been devoted to her name. The prestigious TEXT+KRITIK literary magazine even dedicated an entire issue to her.

20 years of life in Germany has not clouded Herta Muller’s reflections on Romania, which she continues to draw upon. She says that, quote: “The most overwhelming experience for me was living under the dictatorial regime in Romania. And simply living in Germany, hundreds of km away, does not erase my past experience. I packed up my past when I left, and remember that dictatorships are still a current tropic in Germany.” Herta Muller’s need to write also came to life under a dictatorship. “I’ve had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it’s as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live”, the writer once told a journalist.

The Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest invited Herta Muller to read excerpts from her latest book translated into Romanian by Nora Iuga, entitled ‘A lady living in the chignon’. This is a collage-poem, whereby Muller cut out words, or even syllables from Romanian magazines and combined them in a variety of ways. She even made illustrations for some of them. However, her interest in collage-literature dates back some 10 years, while on a vacation abroad. She replaced ordinary postcards with words or syllables cut out from magazines. This is how her book of collage poetry came into being. It was entitled “Is it Ion or not” and was published by the Polirom Publishing house in 2005. This is the writer’s first book to be published in Romanian. Here is Herta Muller herself talking about her relationship with Romanian:

”I was very happy to see that my Romanian collages came out well. Just using scissors to make them was great and I felt that language was at my disposal throughout the job. This was my small game with Romanian, but I couldn’t write in Romania. Having words at hand and feeling their underlying meanings is different. I have an average person’s command of Romanian and I believe Romanian’s most beautiful aspect is the daily language I learnt when working for the car factory. Somebody asked me today what it was that I have learnt from the avant-garde and I answered I learned a lot more from folk songs. When I first heard Maria Tanase she sounded incredible to me, it was for the first time that I really felt what folklore meant. Romanian folk music is connected to existence in a very meaningful way. However, German folklore was not at all inspiring for me.”

Herta Muller had a rather belated contact with Romanian, when she was already 15. In her native village from Banat (Western Romania), Nitschidorf, nobody spoke Romanian. She was amazed to find out how different the two languages were from one another, how contradictory they could be sometimes. Herta Muller.

“Metaphors are much more sensual in Romania and go straight to the point. And that direct image suits me better than what my mother tongue German, offers. That was one of the main reasons why I wanted to learn Romanian. I am very sensitive as far as Romanian goes, but my Romanian vocabulary is not that rich. And it is hard to express yourself if your vocabulary is poor. I remember when I met Emil Cioran in Paris, he told me he refused to speak Romanian ever since he had come to France, yet as he grew old he dreamt in Romanian and he just couldn’t help it. Here is this language pouncing upon me and I just cannot protect myself from that, he told me.”

The two languages, the writer told us, look differently even at plants. In Romanian, “snowdrops” are “little tears”, in German they are “maiglockhen”, that is “little May bells”, which means we’re not only speaking about different words, but about different worlds. Romanians see a falling star and say that someone has died, with the Germans you make a wish when you see the falling star. That is why when translating the collage-poems of the volume entitled “A Lady Living in the Chignon”, Nora Iuga has many times made brave alterations. Nora Iuga.

“Whenever we read a collage we feel inclined to call it an experiment. Yet such collages cannot be called experiments. Even if there is a considerable amount of the absurd in those collages, each of them has a profoundly human content. These poems appeal to man and speak about the things people live and feel. Behind this stylistic exercise, grave and very serious poetry is hidden. I was used to this kind of writing because, although I did not write collages, I like to nurture the absurd and the ludic, and here Herta and I are very close to each another. And Herta’s artistic instinct is amazing – she told me not to be too particular about the meaning of the words, as this could give rise to catastrophe. She gave me all the freedom I needed and I brimmed with joy at that, as I rewrote about 50% of the text.”

For her collage texts, Herta Muller created a special table for herself and arranged a whole library, ordered alphabetically. The collage very much resembles life, Herta Muller says, as the random plays a crucial role in this respect. You’re looking for a word and come across another, which all of a sudden seems more appropriate, more appealing. Then you paste them on cardboard and the poem is ready, you cannot change anything. That is what Herta Muller likes best about the collage: once made you cannot change any of it, and that’s what brings the collage as close to life as possible. You cannot bring back the past, you cannot wipe away the poem just as you can with an ordinary poem.

Aside from the two volumes we’ve been talking about today, “The Lady Living in the Chignon” and “Is It Ion or Not”, three additional volumes of Herta Muller’s poetry have been translated into Romanian: ”The King Bends and Kills” and “The Heart’s Animal” as well as “Quite Long Ago The Fox was the Hunter”.


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