101 Letters to a Prime Minister Page 15
The American edition of A Clockwork Orange was originally published without the last chapter. This editorial cut, which Burgess opposed, does throw the construction of the novel off balance. Nonetheless, Alex’s uncertain claim at the end of Chapter 20 that he is cured is, I think, an ending more consistent with the material that has come earlier. It is this truncated version that Stanley Kubrick used to make his celebrated movie. He too clearly preferred a conclusion that wasn’t so facilely optimistic.
What I’ve said so far may make you think that A Clockwork Orange is a blandly pious work, reducible to a few moral bromides. That’s not the case. Just as a hockey game can’t be reduced to its score, so a work of art can’t be reduced to a summary. What makes A Clockwork Orange incompressible is its language. Alex and his friends speak a most peculiar English. Here’s a sample, taken at random:
I did not quite kopat what he was getting at govoreeting about calculations, seeing that getting better from feeling bolnoy is like your own affair and nothing to do with calculations. He sat down, all nice and droogy, on the bed’s edge …
A mixture of English slang and words derived from Russian, delivered in cadences that sometimes sound biblical, at other times Elizabethan, it is this language, Nadsat, that makes A Clockwork Orange an enduring work of literature. It is the juice in the orange. The context makes the meaning of most Nadsat words clear, and the occasional befuddlement is not unpleasant.
Canadians go to the polls tomorrow. I offer you A Clockwork Orange the day before for a good reason. There’s an element in the novel that is eerily familiar. The government under which Alex lives is democratically elected, yet it has recourse to policies that undermine the foundations of democracy. We have seen these kinds of policies for eight years now in the United States, a country morally bankrupted by its current president. You claim to have a solution for what to do with Alex. The experts disagree with you, as do the courts and the people; certainly the people in Quebec are resisting your ideas. But you think you know better.
Are you sure, Mr. Harper, that what you have up your sleeve aren’t so many Ludovico Methods?
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
P.S. Have you seen Kubrick’s classic adaptation? It’s one of those rare cases where the movie is as good as the book. I’ll try to find a DVD copy. When I do, I’ll send it along.
ANTHONY BURGESS (1917–1993) was a prolific English novelist, poet, playwright, biographer, literary critic, linguist, translator and composer. His publications run the gamut from linguistically sophisticated literary novels like his Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, to criticism of works by James Joyce, to symphonies, to dystopian satires.
BOOK 41:
GILGAMESH
IN AN ENGLISH VERSION BY STEPHEN MITCHELL
October 27, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
The oldest story in the world, to celebrate your second minority,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Congratulations on your electoral win. You must be pleased with your increased minority. What your continued tenure as prime minister means, among other things, is that our book club has survived. We can now really settle into this business of discussing books. Since we have more time, why don’t we go back in time. Why don’t we start where book talk probably started, along the banks of the river Euphrates. What has become known as the standard version of the epic of Gilgamesh was set down between the years 1300 and 1000 BCE in cuneiform on twelve clay tablets in Babylonian, a dialect of the Akkadian language. But earlier written fragments in Sumerian about the heartbroken king of Uruk date from around 2000 BCE, and the historical Gilgamesh, well, he died in about 2750 BCE, just a couple of centuries shy of five thousand years ago.
Gilgamesh predates Homer and predates the Bible. It is the cultural soil out of which these later texts emerged, which is why some elements in the epic will sound familiar to you. Before the biblical Flood there was the Great Flood in Gilgamesh. Before Noah’s Ark, there was the ship Utnapishtim built, crowded with animals. In Gilgamesh, there is an odyssey before the Odyssey and there is one who overcame mortality before Jesus of Nazareth overcame it. The theme of a terrible flood also finds itself echoed in the Hindu story of Matsya the fish, Vishnu’s first avatar, and the theme of fear will perhaps remind you of the Bhagavad Gita, which I sent you last year. Remember Arjuna’s fear before the battle? It is not dissimilar to Gilgamesh’s fear before death. The inexorableness of fate might remind you of classical Greek thinking, just as the petulance of the Sumerian gods is much like that of the Greek gods. Gilgamesh is the mother of all stories. We, as literary animals, start with Gilgamesh.
That might make you think that reading the epic will be like staring into a display window of crude stone sculptures in an archaeology museum. Not so, I promise you, certainly not in the version of Gilgamesh that I’m sending you, by the American translator Stephen Mitchell. He’s done away with scholarly encrustations and dull fidelity to disjointed fragments (though, if you care, there is a good introduction and lots of notes). Mitchell has sought to be faithful to the spirit of the original, more mindful of the needs of the English reader than the sensibility of the archaeologist.
The result is exhilarating. The prose is simple, vigorous and stately, the action thrillingly dramatic. I encourage you to read the epic aloud. It’s an easy oral read, you will see. Your tongue will not trip, your mind will not stumble. Like the beating of a drum, the cadence of the beats and the repetition of some passages will hold you in thrall.
The mind can be immortal, living forever through ideas. An idea can leap from mind to mind, going down through the generations, forever keeping ahead of death. The mind of Plato, for example, is still with us, long dead though he is. But the heart? The heart is inescapably mortal. Every heart dies. Of Plato’s heart, its share of things felt, we know nothing. Gilgamesh is the story of one man’s heart and its breaking in the face of death. The emotional immediacy is palpable. Gilgamesh, king of great-walled Uruk, won’t seem alien to you because that aggrieved voice pleading directly in your ear isn’t from over four thousand years ago—it’s the pulsing of your own perishable heart. Our only hope is that we might live as authentically as Gilgamesh and find a friend as loving and loyal as Enkidu.
There are some lovely lines. Keep an eye out for “A gust of wind passed,” and “A gentle rain fell onto the mountains.” They glow within their context. And there is a snake that does Gilgamesh a bad turn. That too will be biblically familiar to you. This snake, though, does not proffer; it takes. But the result is the same: unhappy Gilgamesh must accept his fate as a mortal.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
STEPHEN MITCHELL (b. 1943) is a polyglot American translator known for his poetic, rather than literal, translations. He has translated works originally written in German, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Sanskrit and Danish. His other translations include the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddhist Tao Te Ching. He has also published a collection of poetry, two novels, three works of non-fiction and several children’s books.
BOOK 42:
GILGAMESH
IN AN ENGLISH VERSION BY DERREK HINES
November 10, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Again, but made modern,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Gilgamesh again. But a very different Gilgamesh. The version I sent you two weeks ago took liberties, but the better to serve the original Sumerian classic. One senses that Stephen Mitchell took the broken clay tablets, fitted the pieces together and then adeptly filled in where the cracks made it hard to read. Our guide on that breathless trip across five thousand years to the banks of the Euphrates re
mained egoless and anonymous. Of Mitchell, we sensed nothing; in fact, we didn’t even think to enquire about him.
With Gilgamesh as interpreted by the Canadian poet Derrek Hines, the time travel is in the opposite direction. It’s Mesopotamia that’s yanked into the present day, every speck of archaeological dust blown off. This version is all about liberties, and the clay tablets have been thrown out. Take the opening lines. In the Mitchell version, they go:
Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
beyond all others, violent, splendid,
a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers—
fortress they called him, protector of the people,
raging flood that destroys all defences—
two-thirds divine and one-third human …
With Hines, we get:
Here is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy’s boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.
Get the picture? You don’t want to read the versions in the wrong order. With the Mitchell, the scope, the vastness, the timelessness of an ancient epic is felt. With the Hines, you might wonder where the epic went. What’s all this riffing? Well, that’s it, the riffing is the point. Remember Ishtar’s anger when Gilgamesh rejects her, how she goes to her father, the god Anu, wanting to borrow the Bull of Heaven so that she can unleash it on Uruk? This is what Hines makes of it, Ishtar speaking:
“I’ll have the Bull of Heaven or I’ll unzip Hell,
and free the un-dead to suck frost into the living.”
Then, on a pulse, an actor’s mood change—
she, pouting: “Darling Anu,
you know how I’m insulted;
I want, want the Bull of Heaven
to revenge my honour.”
She lifts a perfect foot to stamp,
and the tiles of Heaven’s floor in rivalry
shift like a Rubik’s cube to receive it.
It’s Gilgamesh meets Naomi Campbell. Besides the Rubik’s cube, there are a great many other un-Mesopotamian references in the text: atomic blasts, Brueghel, buildings in New York, CAT scans, event horizons, express trains, Marlene Dietrich, oxygen masks, paparazzi, Swiss bank accounts, X-rays, the Wizard of Oz, and so on. This joy in the anachronistic bears witness to the very different approach that Hines takes.
All things are met and understood through one mind, the one we have. Timelessness, transcendence, the evanescence of the ego—these are true, but they are not what we experience. They were neither felt by Gilgamesh, nor are they felt by us. We are not all one. We are just one, each on our own. You, me, him, her, six billion times over. Each one of us has a blip note of mortality. It’s only when the blips are put together that we seem to hear a symphony throbbing down through time. Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh plays on that symphony. He makes the epic new, but it works because we know it’s old. Hines wants none of this hand-me-down worth. He’s a modern; this blip here and now will speak freshly for that old, fifty-century-old blip. With Hines you get the singularity of the living poet expressing himself in his own right, drawing attention to himself, saying “This is me, this is our language, this is our condition—whaddya think?”
I think it’s very good. A harder read than the Mitchell, for sure. At times, the poetic pithiness requires work to unpack. Then in the next stanza, a startling image makes perfect sense. Which is why I would recommend that you read the Hines more than once. It’s only sixty pages, and well spaced at that. The more familiar you are with it, the more it will make sense, and soon enough you will have furnished a beautiful room in your mind. It’s a rich, exciting text, with some stabbingly brilliant lines. Take this, part of Gilgamesh’s lament upon Enkidu’s death:
The complaisant dead inch away,
dislocating the shared vanishing point
of our perspective,
and we struggle to repaint the picture.
A last example. Gilgamesh, after getting “snake-drunk” and losing the herb of eternal life, returns to Uruk to die. He has this to say:
We are made and broken on a miracle
we look on and cannot see—as though
we had sold out instinct to thought
blinding us to what the world is,
the heart’s gate to eternity.
That is a truth very old and, here, totally modern.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
DERREK HINES is an award-winning Canadian poet best known for his reinterpretation of the epic Gilgamesh. By injecting modern images into his free verse retelling, Hines shrinks the gap of time between Sumerian origins and a contemporary audience, and recharges the tale’s powerful effect. Hines has published two books of poetry. Raised in Southern Ontario, he now lives on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall.
BOOK 43:
THE UNCOMMON READER
BY ALAN BENNETT
November 24, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A short novel on a healthy addiction,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
I can’t think of a more delightful introduction to the republic of letters than Alan Bennett’s short novel The Uncommon Reader. One day at the bottom of the Palace garden, parked next to the kitchen garbage bins, alerted by her corgis, the Queen discovers the City of Westminster’s travelling library. She pops in to apologize for the barking dogs and, once there, impelled by a sense of duty rather than any real interest, she takes out a book. This simple act marks the beginning of Her Majesty’s downfall, in a way. The irony in the story is as light as whipped cream, the humour as appealing as candy, the characterization as crisp as potato chips, but at the heart of it there’s something highly nutritious to be digested: the effect that books can have on a life.
Upon finishing the book, you will think you know HM better, you will feel closer to her, you will like her. This is in part because of Bennett’s skill in bringing his royal character to life. But it also has to do with the nature of books. In the republic of letters, all readers are equal. Unlike other retail outlets, bookstores don’t really come in categories, be it luxury or low-end. A bookstore is a bookstore. Some specialize, but the restriction there has only to do with kinds of books—say modern languages or art—and not with classes of readers. Everyone is welcome in bookstores and all types rub shoulders in them, the wealthy and the poor, the highly educated and the self-taught, the old and the young, the adventurous and the conventional, and others still. You might even bump into the Queen.
Before I forget, one of our very own great Canadian writers, Alice Munro, makes a cameo appearance in The Uncommon Reader, on page 67.
Since I’m on the topic of bookstores, I thought I’d include a few snapshots of some that I’ve visited recently.
The Bookseller Crow on the Hill is in Crystal Palace, a neighbourhood in the south of London where I’ve been staying recently. I’m standing next to John, the genial owner, and I’m holding in my hand the very book you now own, which I bought from John. The Crow is not a very big place in terms of square footage, but stand in front on any shelf—New Titles, Fiction, History, Philosophy, Poetry, Travel—and the mental space represented is as vast as the universe.
The next photo is of a small, venerable used bookstore on Milton Street in Montreal called The Word. It has served generations of students. I popped in to buy a novel by the English writer Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom Bennett mentions in his book and whom I’d never read. I found A Family and a Fortune, published in 1939. It cost me $3.95.
The last photo is of La Librairie du Square, a French bookstore also in Montreal. It was my father who taped the red poster you see on the glass door. It announces an event organized by PEN, Amnesty International and l’UNEQ to do with freedom of expressio
n and imprisoned writers.
Independent bookstores are a vanishing breed, especially in North America. The ones who suffer the most from this disappearance are not necessarily readers, but neighbourhoods. After all, a large Chapters or Indigo or Barnes & Noble will hold more books than any reader could possibly read in a lifetime. But large chain stores tend to be fewer in number and are often accessible only by car. The Bookseller Crow, on the other hand, is in a row of small stores that includes a clothes store, a café, a pet store that specializes in fish, a shoe store, a real estate agent, a hairdresser, a newsagent, a bakery, a betting agency, a number of restaurants, and so on. The Word and La Librairie du Square are on streets along which thousands of people walk every day. Whenever an independent bookstore disappears, shareholders somewhere may be richer, but a neighbourhood is for sure poorer.
I’m sorry for writing such a busy letter, but there’s one last matter I’d like to mention. A few weeks ago, on October 20 to be exact, I came upon an article in the New York Times on a man in Colombia who for the last decade has been travelling around his war-ravaged corner of the country with two donkeys—named Alfa and Beto—loaded with books. He stops in every remote pueblo to read to children and to lend books out. He started his Biblioburro, as he calls it, after seeing the positive effect that reading had on students growing up in a violent and uncertain environment. Ten years on, Luis Soriano remarks that his enterprise has become an obligation, and it is now considered an institution.