Malina Read online

  Copyright © 1971 by Suhrkamp Verlag

  Copyright © 2019 by New Directions

  Translation copyright © 1990, 2019 by Philip Boehm

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Rachel Kushner

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published in Germary as Malina by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1971.

  The musical passages on pages 6 and 267 are taken from Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21, by Arnold Schoenberg. Lyrics by Cecil Gray.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 1440 in 2019

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date to come

  Names: Bachmann, Ingeborg, 1926–1973, author. | Kushner, Rachel, writer

  of introduction. | Boehm, Philip, translator.

  Title: Malina / Ingeborg Bachmann ; introduction by Rachel Kushner ; translated

  by Philip Boehm.

  Other titles: Malina. English

  Description: New York : New Directions Book, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019004327 | ISBN 9780811228725 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women—Austria—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Austria—Fiction. | Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Austria—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT2603.A147 M313 2019 | DDC 833/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004327

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  Contents

  Introduction

  Translator’s note

  * * *

  Malina

  The Cast:

  One Happy with Ivan

  Two The Third Man

  Three Last Things

  Introduction

  I remember the first time I heard the title of this work, the word “Malina.” Where I was standing, what room I was in, the man who said the word. It sounded so important and complete: Ma-li-na, stress on the first syllable. Stress on every syllable. So symmetrical and smoothly oblique.

  “It’s a novel?” I asked the man.

  “Yes, a very important work by a major Austrian writer.”

  In “important” and “Austrian” and “work” I computed that its author, a woman, was in fact an honorary man. He didn’t have to say it. He said it in the way his shoes were shined. The way he held his expensive raincoat over one arm. This was an office setting, and he was in a position above me. The way he announced the existence of Ingeborg Bachmann suggested that he believed, consciously or not, that she belonged to the world of men; perhaps she even derived from it. Anything is possible. Whether consciously or not, I put a claim on her, as someone to study, on account of her status as an honorary man.

  I immediately read the novel. What I encountered in that book, which is this one, and yet not, because I will never again be the age at which I first read it, was a portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho’s “Fragment 31.” The narrative voice, first person and female, is concerned with what she calls “today,” a word “only suicides ought to be allowed to use, it has no meaning for other people.” “Today” is time as emergency, a present overtaken by what, elsewhere, she calls “a virus,” by which I suspect she means what someone else might call love (or being in love), if by saying love, they meant a condition that suddenly renders a person incomplete.

  Greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me, says Sappho (in Anne Carson’s translation), lines that are open to interpretation, but from Longinus forward are generally taken to mean some profound loss of self in the desire for another. But no one knows where Sappho was going, since the final lines of the poem are lost. Bachmann’s elisions, in a book about female desire and consciousness and loss of self, are intended: the elisions are brutal and internal; Malina is complete.

  “I loved Bachmann a great deal,” fellow Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard once told an interviewer. “She was a very intelligent woman. A strange combination, no? Most women are stupid but bearable, possibly even agreeable; intelligent too, but rarely.”

  Can a man understand this book? Completely. No less than a woman can understand Thomas Bernhard. A man can appreciate Malina. He doesn’t have to suffer it, while a woman who reads this book might feel the same burns and itching from the wool dress the narrator puts on, late in the narrative—not by choice, by cosmic attrition, as her possessions start to go missing. But Malina is not a novel that is easy for anyone to understand, in a more normal sense of comprehension—the who, what, and why. I won’t pretend. It’s a difficult book in which to find your footing. There are all sorts of references in it, to Schoenberg, to Vienna, to historical events, not all of which the reader will catch. But once you’re in, you’re in. You’re not decoding. Toward the end, you’re racing along, deep in the rhythms of the narrator’s thoughts, which are bone-true and demonically intelligent—and I mean it would be a real burden to be that mentally acute, it can’t go well for a person to know that much, it can only lead to ill health, drinking, and despair—and then the novel careens over a cliff. Although “careens” and “cliff” are subjective. The narrator disappears in an inevitable and disturbing manner.

  Who is she? An unknown woman, as she herself puts it, unnamed, and a writer. What is the situation? It’s not clear, except she lives in an apartment in Vienna with one man (Malina), and is in love with another (Ivan), who lives down the street. In the first chapter, Happy with Ivan, the joke is that she’s not happy, but happiness has no share. She spends a lot of time waiting for Ivan and smoking cigarettes, and writes letters at night that she shreds instead of mails. She narrates a fantastic tale about a princess who exists in a kind of premodern utopia. In the second chapter, she dreams of hellish scenes of war-time suffering and death, of fascism and empire and very bad fathers. In the third and final section she speaks to Malina about a mailman who hoarded what he was meant to deliver, on account of an existential crisis she calls “Privacy of Mail,” meaning that no letter should ever, finally, be sent. She tells Malina about her former job working the night shift at a news service, which exposed her to “the swindle from up close,” i.e., the meaninglessness of the churn of days, of topical news, and even of time as ordered by shared events. She talks about a hobo in Paris who was given a shower that spiritually undid him. No one should be made clean, she says, for a new life “that does not exist.” The hobo and the mailman get high marks but mostly she delivers withering judgments of men. She calls intellectuals “men without true secrets.” And she says that the contortions women go through to respond to male desire require a woman to invent false feelings and to shelter her real feelings “in the ones she’s invented.” But, she says, “for the longest time I had no feelings at all, since during those years I was entering the age of reason.”

  Some of her talk is embellished with musical notation, rubato, con fuoco, forte, forte, fortissimo, and so on. Why is this narrator so agitated? By the virus, which isn’t exactly love, now that I think about it, but an undoing that seems almost criminal, because its grammar is so insufficient. She operates in a field of signs, an entire sensory reality, that is male. The male characters in the book, some have speculated
, are mere alter egos, not “real” men, but part of her own psyche. Her troubles are deeper than plain old patriarchy, though, and derive also from Nazism, and the ways in which fascism transforms from public to private menace, a postwar specter of cruelty and destruction. She is steeped in a broad lexicon of existential issues that burn her like lit cigarettes. She’s also very funny, especially in the third section of the book, when her mind goes into overdrive. Asked by Malina if she’s going to a friend’s funeral, she says she doesn’t want to be constantly informed of that friend’s—or anyone’s—death. “They don’t constantly tell me that someone is alive,” she says. And anyhow, “it’s rare that anyone is living, except in the theater of my thoughts.” The idea that there are men who are good lovers, she says, is “a legend that has to be destroyed.” A man might expose his bare back to her, on which some other woman has dug her nails and left traces. “What are you supposed to do with this back?” Which echoes a question in the first chapter, in a letter addressed to a “Mr. President,” in which she declares that she was born with half a good-luck bonnet. “What would you do, Mr. President, with half a presidency, half an honor, half a recognition, half a hat, what would you even do with this half letter?”

  Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1926. She was a brilliant student who completed a PhD dissertation on Martin Heidegger (whom she wanted to prove wrong), but she seems to have almost immediately transferred her intellectual attachments to Wittgenstein. She wrote radio plays and poetry and won the prestigious Gruppe 47 prize in 1953, one of only two women to be made famous by that group, which included Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Uwe Johnson. Even after she quit poetry for prose, she continued to be known primarily as a lyric poet. Repeatedly she was asked in interviews to defend her decision to give up poetry. “Quitting is a strength, not a weakness,” she retorted. She had a love affair with Paul Celan. Another with Max Frisch. She was something of a mentor to Thomas Bernhard, who immortalized her, as the poet Maria, in his final novel, Extinction. She apparently advised Bernhard to save himself by fleeing Austria. In 1953, she herself had moved to Rome, where she remained until the end of her life, which came somewhat suddenly, in 1973, from an accident, while smoking in bed.

  She was friends with Fleur Jaeggy, who described her, in a portrait of a summer journey they took in 1971 as “soignée” and smelling of roses and easy with silence. Bachmann, says Jaeggy, knew with precision “all the nuances that might hurt or wound.” And It was Bachmann who “manned” the road maps on their journey. But of course she manned the maps. She’s still something of an honorary man, it seems. The edition of “Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature” devoted to her oeuvre was the only edition in the series on a woman—at least at the time my copy was printed, in 1995. Perhaps now they’ve added a few. No matter, Bachmann has launched a thousand dissertations, it seems, on feminist thought, and even books that interrogate the feminist thought inspired by her work.

  Malina, which was published in 1971, was only to be one novel in a cycle that Bachmann called “deathstyles” or “ways of death.” After she died, it was made into a film by Werner Schroeter, starring Isabelle Huppert, with a script written by Elfriede Jelinek. Critics leapt on the film as lacking in nuance. I still haven’t seen it, but it’s probably better than they thought.

  What drove Bachmann’s writing, she told an interviewer just before she died, was an unshakeable belief in a utopia she knew would never come about. “It won’t come and yet I believe in it,” she said. The descriptions of the princess in Malina, who rides a black horse and follows the Danube as if the river flowed free of countries, of empires, are perhaps the most literal proof of Bachmann’s version of hope. The princess, though, reaches “the end of the world.” And her story must remain nested inside another that is sardonic and bleak. The narrator has promised Ivan she would write a beautiful book, but she ends up writing, as she tells him, a book about hell. But that book—about hell—is not this one, or not entirely.

  I have my own ideas on the final moment at the end, and what it means, but I don’t want to give it away here, before you yourself read this letter that Bachmann—or her narrator, and it really does not matter which—did not shred, or hoard, but wrote, and sent, with the urgency of “today.”

  rachel kushner

  Translator’s note

  “I’m staring at the wall which is showing a crack, it must be an old crack that now is gently spreading because I keep staring at it.”

  I have been staring at Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina for a very long time through a crack in the wall of translation—a crack widened by thirty years of scholarship since I first attempted to render this exquisitely complex book into English. The recent German critical edition has been very helpful in revealing references that were previously obscure: I learned, for example, that the description of the Danube used in the “Princess of Kagran” fairytale contained substantial quotations from a German translation of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, so it made sense to turn to the original text to recover the appropriate passages.

  In the meantime, another wall has cracked open completely—and I am no longer living in Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, as I was when I first started translating this novel, with limited access to resources: today I can also roam unencumbered across the World Wide Web. Since readers, too, can turn to the Internet to indulge their curiosity (as we hope they will), we have jettisoned the notes and glosses present in the earlier version.

  I further hope that three decades of translating literary texts has sharpened my discernment; I certainly have benefited from the tutelage of such great editors as Sara Bershtel and Drenka Willen. In regard to Malina, I am particularly grateful to New Directions’ Barbara Epler, Erik Rieselbach, and Tynan Kogane for the care they lavish on the books they publish and on all involved in their creation. I would also like to mention my indebtedness to Mark Anderson, who initially led (or lured!) me down this path, as well as remember Max Holmes, who first published this book in English. Heinz Bachmann, too, has been very kind.

  My encounter with a translator who was once me has been a bit unsettling, and this is a great opportunity to do penance for past transgressions. I only hope you, gentle reader, will absolve me of any sins committed in the present.

  philip Boehm

  Malina

  The Cast:

  * * *

  Ivan:

  * * *

  born in Pécs, Hungary (formerly Fünfkirchen) in 1935. Has been living for some years now in Vienna, where he pursues his neatly ordered affairs in a building on the Kärntnerring. To avoid any unnecessary complications for Ivan and his future, this shall be designated an Institute for Extremely Important Matters, since it deals with money. It is not the Credit Union.

  Béla & András:

  the children, aged 7 and 5

  Malina:

  forty years old today, although it is impossible to guess by his appearance. Author of an “Apocrypha” no longer available in bookstores, but which sold a few copies in the late fifties. He has assumed as a disguise the status of a Class A Civil Servant employed in the Austrian Army Museum, where advanced degrees in history (his major) and art history (his minor) enabled him to find a good position. He is moving steadily up the ladder without motion, ambition or intrigue, and without calling attention to himself by making demands or petty criticisms of the procedures and written transactions between the Defense Ministry on Franz-Josefs-Kai and the museum in the Arsenal. Although quite inconspicuous, the latter remains one of our city’s most curious institutions.

  Myself:

  Austrian passport, issued by the Ministry of the Interior. Official Austrian I.D. Eyes — br., Hair — blnd.; born in Klagenfurt; some dates follow and a profession (crossed out twice and written over); addresses (crossed out three times); a
bove which in clear block letters: Ungargasse 6, Vienna III.

  Time:

  Today

  Place:

  Vienna

  * * *

  But I had to think long and hard about the Time, since “today” is an impossible word for me, even though I hear and say it daily, you can’t escape it. When people start telling me what they have planned for today — not to mention tomorrow — I get confused. My relationship with “today” is so bad that many people often mistake extreme attentiveness for an absentminded gaze. This “today” sends me flying into the utmost anxiety and the greatest haste, so that I can only write about it, or at best report whatever’s going on. Actually, anything written about “today” should be destroyed immediately, just like all real letters are crumpled or torn up, unfinished and unmailed, all because they were written, but cannot arrive, “today.”

  Whoever has composed an intensely fervent letter only to tear it to shreds and throw it away knows exactly what is meant by “today.” And who hasn’t run into barely legible scribbles such as: “Please come if you can, if you want to, I might kindly request! 5:00 pm — Café Landtmann!” Or telegrams like: “Please phone right away stop today.” Or: “Impossible today.”

  In fact, “today” is a word that only suicides ought to be allowed to use, it has no meaning for other people. It merely signifies a day like all the rest, when they have to work another eight hours or take time off, run errands, buy groceries, read the morning and evening papers, drink coffee, forget things, keep an appointment, give someone a call — in short, a day on which something is supposed to occur or, better yet, not too much is happening.