Peter Handke reads in Marbach: The last translation

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“Are you here because of the writer?” asks the waitress in the “Turnerheim”, Swabian-Italian cuisine, up on the Schillerhöhe, opposite the German Literature Archive in Marbach. “He sits outside and eats.” Peter Handke asks on leaving whether we came because of Fabjan Hafner. He has a cold, you can hear it a bit, but the event has already been postponed. “See you then”.

The event in the Humboldt Hall of the archive building is a kind of book presentation, late of course, the pandemic forced it. The book: “First and Last Poems” by the Austrian literary scholar, translator and poet Fabjan Hafner, published by Suhrkamp in 2020.

Fabjan Hafner was born in 1966 into a family of Koroški Slovenci, the autochthonous, Slovene-speaking minority in Carinthia, which also included Handke’s maternal grandparents. In 2016 he chose suicide. Later, on the podium, Handke asked Hafner’s widow, Zdenka Hafner-Čelan, almost shyly, whether one could say that. Hafner-Čelan works as a translation scholar and interpreter. This evening she is reciting her husband’s poems – not only, but mostly – in Slovenian.

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The hall, rust-brown carpet, dark wood, eggshell veneer and a little bit of exposed aggregate concrete, is not crowded, but it doesn’t appear empty either. Almost a hundred, generously estimated, came, the number of mask wearers is in the low double-digit range, and it’s not just the elderly who want to protect themselves. It is difficult to say who is part of the community, who is archiving or researching bequests and legacies high above the old town of Marbach, who has finally traveled there especially for the evening. And also why exactly they are there: because of a rare appearance by the Nobel Prize winner? Or because of Fabjan Hafner, whom the Swiss writer Ilma Rakusa, who has Slovenian-Hungarian parents, rightly called “half a child prodigy” in a 2016 obituary in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”? Handke also said about Hafner on the podium that evening: “He was a child” – but the 79-year-old adds: “An incredibly vulnerable child”.

Hafner was half a child when he met Handke in person for the first time, only 15. He ended up attending a book presentation. Author of the book: Florjan Lipuš. The book: “Der Zögling Tjaž”, the first novel published in Slovenian in Austria since 1945. His translator: Lipuš’ boarding school fellow Peter Handke. He smiles at the fact that there were numerous would-be Slovenian poets in Carinthia at the time. Some of them “crossed the threshold,” the Nobel Prize winner recalls, remembering that Hafner, Handke calls him by his first name, was the one “who stayed behind.”

Peter Handke and Zdenka Hafner-Čelan

Peter Handke and Zdenka Hafner-Čelan

Source: DLA Marbach, www.dla-marbach.de

And he also tells how he came to translate “Tjaž” – “that’s Matthias!” – of all things: Having returned home after years abroad, he wanted to brush up on his Slovene, which he learned from his grandparents and mother, probably his first, then forgotten language. He didn’t want to do this with a grammar in hand, but based on something that has now been written. With great consequences: Because it was Handke’s translation, done together with Helga Mračnikar, that interestingly enough only revived interest in Slovene-language literature from Austria in Slovenia, back in the 1980s, which Handke, he says in Marbach, for literature anyway better than anything that followed.

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What followed was a young poet and scholar, who followed in Handke’s footsteps as a Lipuš translator. Fabjan Hafner translated two Lipuš novels into German, later also wrote a powerful book about Slovenia in the work of Peter Handke and a highly instructive essay about Handke as a translator not only from his mother tongue, but also from English (Walker Percy), French ( for example René Char, but also Patrick Mondiano), the ancient Greek (Sophokles, Euripides). Peter Handke translated 30 books, von Bülow had already encouraged the audience to marvel at the beginning of the evening. Hafner’s “First and Last Poems” are said to be the last of these books, he says at the end, but he doesn’t seem so sure that that’s true. Even if it fits with what Handke said in an interview with André Müller at the end of the 1990s: “When I was translating, I often had a tremendous longing to write. I almost had to cry from longing.”

What would Hafner have said about Handke’s translations of his own early and late works? One wishes for him tonight. According to Zdenka Hafner-Čelan, Handke asked her only to give him what had not been translated so far – however, among the poems that have now been published in Handke’s translation, there is one that her husband has already published in his own translation. It will be one of the very early poems: It says “Kuh” and begins in Handke’s German like this: “Giant body, / more gentle / in the darkness of the stable / born, trustingly follow / no matter which pull of the chain, / still on your last way, there / to the city, to the butcher.”

Anyone who doesn’t agree with both Ilma Rakusa and Peter Handke with these lines, that with the teenager Florjan Hafner one had in front of oneself half an incredibly vulnerable child prodigy, read on: “Sometimes you/me brush your horns so that I/not forget that you do not impale me only /because you love me.” In a sadly loving review of the “First and Last Poems” which was read in the weekly newspaper “Der Freitag” and which is at the same time a farewell, noted the Hafner friend, historian and writer Karsten Krampitz criticized that Hafner translated this poem himself. Where Handke says “trustworthy”, the author would have chosen the word “pious as a lamb”.

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Which, of course, underscores the gentle humor that breathes into the sadness of Hafner’s verses. Hafner’s widow does not mention such details, but points out that her husband took liberties with the translation of his own texts, which would have resulted in more than translations being produced. And so, one concludes, Handke’s translation may well stand between Hafner’s Slovenian and German texts, and always closer to the original. That “Kuh” is one of two poems that Handke reads in Slovenian, even more tentatively, more decipherably than when he reads the translations, which he occasionally interrupts to throw in explanations about the blues, for example, and about the fact that Hafner looks on the book cover as if he were singing it goes with everything.

Zdenka Hafner-Čelan reads her husband’s poems more calmly, with a seriousness that reveals the beauty of a language that is rarely heard. Handke appears relaxed, his hands emphasizing the lecture here and there, but more often his answers to Bülow’s questions. What does he mean by the words “achieve success”, he asks the moderator and indicates the drawing of a bow. Later, when there is applause for a particularly witty exchange of blows, there is also a high-five handkes in the air in the direction of Bülows.

However, the mood on the podium is never silly, rather serious and at the same time cheerful, like at a funeral service, where a mention of the deceased is always accompanied by a gentle smile. “There will always be Fabjan,” Handke explained at the beginning, also through him for the audience, which is why the question as to why exactly they came to Marbach today is pointless. That the queue of those who would like the translator’s signature in their copy of Hafner’s poems to end up being long is also correct.

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