There and back from a linguistic-cultural dystopia. Translate “Here the path gets lost” by Peské Marty

Of Daniele Petruccioli

“The night of the ball was a Caucasian night.”

It is the first sentence of a book just published by Adelphi in my translation, a novel of over four hundred pages co-written by Antoinette Peské and Pierre Marty, husband and wife authors of three joint novels, one of which is this one. Very little is known about him, except that he was a jurist by training and passionate about oriental philosophies. But the interesting character, needless to say, is her.

Daughter of a Polish painter who had studied in Paris with Pissarro and was a close friend of Marie Curie and Apollinaire, it was the latter who recognized in Antoinette a great poetic talent already at the age of eight, seeing her poems posted at the Galerie Malpel in 1914, when the girl was just ten years old. According to the writer herself, the poet had also intended to have them published, but her death in 1918 would have ruined the project. However, the declarations of this extraordinary storyteller must be taken with the benefit of inventory. In the 81 years of her life she did not limit herself to poetry and co-authored books, but, at the age of thirty-seven, she signed a novel entirely about herself (The bone box, for Denoël) which earned none other than Cocteau’s acclaim. In the 1950s, three novels by her and her husband were published, signed “Peské Marty”, one of which – precisely the Path – for Gallimard.

It will be Jean-Pierre Sicre, founder of Phébus editions, who will rediscover and republish it in the 2000s. And it is Sicre again who insinuates that it was Marty, perhaps the less “writer” of the two, who had more of a role in the Path (against Peské’s statements when he was still alive, which cannot be denied given that Marty had already been dead for about thirty years), on the basis of his linguistic and story-telling ubertosity, given that The bone box it would rather seem “carved in ice”, to use Sicre’s words again. Here too, personally I wouldn’t trust it too much, knowing the versatility and, so to speak, biographical plurality of Peské, born in Paris in the midst of the Belle Époque to a Slavic impressionist and a noblewoman from Kjachta, a city on the Russian-Mongolian border, to the south of Lake Baikal. But let’s get to the novel.

Here the path gets lost begins during a great dance in the snow, under a blanket of stars and purple masks, during which the news of the death of Alexander I is made public – the revolutionary tsar who according to Tolstoy will not be dead but will become the mystical Fyodor Kuz’mič, capable to make the ruthless Nicholas I cry – and continues on a long journey towards the East of three characters (who could – or maybe not – be just one). From the point of view of the plot, it ranges from the mystical crises of an Orthodox monk to the love affairs between Turkmen slaves in Samarkand, from the political intrigues in the Siberian forests, with their wolves and their rebellious religious communities (which very closely resemble, today, certain American Mennonite settlements), to the Tibetan lamaserie with their tantric magical rites.

From a linguistic point of view, I can’t find a better adjective than “ubertoso”. There is a meticulous inflorescence of even contradictory eruditions in this journey to the Russian (Siberia, naturally), Mongolian, Chinese and Tibetan Far East at the same time. Just think of the adjective “Ciscaucausian” with which the story opens.

From a cultural point of view, a book published in France in ’55 written by two – we would say today – Frenchmen of Mongolian and Slavic origins, just two years after Stalin’s death (and a year before the XX Congress of the CPSU – where, after many years it is perhaps worth remembering, under the Khrushchev secretariat the cult of personality paid to him was denounced), in which it deals with tsars who become saints, slaves with homosexual loves, pilgrims who become magicians and fight against demons to be saved by dead girls, inevitably had a very strong impact on the Europe of those years. He evidently wanted to save an imaginary that he perceived as moribund. Hence the superfetation of themes, environments and even adjectives. Hence, the importance of adhering to that imagery – like a gechetto to a transparent glass.

Translation is the art of listening and reading (these are strange things, from Gadamer to Calvino) and in Here the path gets lostin my opinion and in my opinion at the publishing house, what was needed on the one hand was unshakable philological precision, and on the other the dexterity of a grave robber.

From the first point of view, fortunately, given that the themes of this book could easily have been commissioned by its Italian publisher (who moreover has in his nervous and circulatory system, I would say, the aspiration which has often succeeded in resurrecting imaginary data for dead), it was enough to remember that, even just for the more broadly Buddhist texts, in Adelphi I had ready and already very well translated texts from Bhartrhari to Gombrich and from Marpa the translator to the King of the world. Furthermore, I was able to ask for advice from Kristin Blancke, who also translated for Adelphi, together with Franco Pizzi, The One Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa and whose help was essential. For everything relating to Russia and Siberia, from the correct transliteration of d’jak to the mechanical description of the tarantàs, the Heaven of literature has miraculously gifted us with Claudia Zonghetti (whose translations from Russian – from Bulgakov to Grossman, from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky – are not even worth mentioning). I am happy to be able to thank here two of the many, many colleagues who form the miraculous, highly cultured, generous community of translators and of which I am proudly honored to be part.

From the point of view of recovery and – let’s say it – of linguistic-cultural theft, it was a question of taking a dystopian journey in reverse. I was able to enjoy browsing through it again The million And The pole fee, resurrect (okay, okay: steal) stylistic features and turns of phrase from Salgari to Mircea Eliade. All while remembering to never be afraid of a strange hat, an unusual color for a sunset, an incomprehensible war cry.

I really enjoyed it, I confess. I hope that the book will find grave robber readers as unscrupulous as myself.