Interview: Barbara Mujica, author of I AM VENUS

Barbara Mujica, author of the acclaimed historical novels frida and Sister Teresa turns her eye to 17^th-century Spain and the court of King Phillip IV in her latest book, I Am Venus, published earlier this month by Overlook. Chronicling the scandalous affair between the great Baroque Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and the young model who became his Venus, Barbara Mujica vividly reimagines the great artist’s rise to prominence, set against a backdrop of political turmoil and romantic scandal. Narrated by the mysterious model who posed for Velázquez’s only female nude, “The Rokeby of Venus,” I Am Venus is a seductive historical novel of the forbidden love between an artist and his muse. Barbara Mujica joins us today on the Winged Elephant to discuss the research and inspiration behind her latest novel. Welcome, Barbara!

OP: How would you describe your novel? Is it a book for fans of historical novels, or fans of Velazquez and Spanish history. Who will it most appeal to?

BM: I Am Venus is aimed at the general reader. Fans of historical fiction will find plenty historical atmosphere. I did a lot of research on food, clothing, homes, leisure activities, and other aspects of 17^th-century life, but the novel doesn’t presuppose a particular interest in the Spanish Golden Age. Similarly, fans of Velázquez will find lots of information about his training and artistic development, his use of color and form, and his relationship with mentors. However, you don’t need to be a Velázquez fan or an expert in Spanish history to enjoy this book. The story is rich and entertaining because Velázquez and his contemporaries were fascinating people living at a fascinating time.

OP: As in your previous novel, frida, you show an uncanny ability to portray the life of an artist – both inside and outside the studio. What experience do you have with the lives of artists?

BM: I have always been enthralled by artists. My husband is an architect with extensive training in art and art history, so I have spent much of my adult life hearing about artists and visiting museums. Furthermore, I work in a period—the late Renaissance—when painting and sculpture were flourishing in Europe, and so art history is part of my intellectual background.

OP: What inspired you to use The Rokeby Venus, among many other of Velasquez’s masterworks?

BM: First of all, Venus is an enigma. We don’t know the circumstances under which this painting was produced, so I was really able to let my imagination run wild. Second, this painting was created during a time of religious repression when nudes were forbidden, and the Inquisition persecuted painters who produced them. The fact that Velázquez painted the Rokeby Venus and got away with it makes for a very enticing plot.

OP: Has the historical identity of the model for The Rokeby Venus ever been established? Can you talk a bit about your creation of her for the novel.

BM: The real identity of the model is explained at the end of the book, so I think I won’t spoil the fun. I will say that due to the way the painting was composed, there has been a lot of conjecture about it, which leaves the writer a lot of leeway.

OP: Velazquez’s wife, Juana, is a fascinating character in the story. How much of her is imagined, or based on historical research?

BM: Her identity is historical. She was the daughter of Velázquez’s painting master, Francisco Pacheco, and the mother-in-law of his apprentice, Mazo. However, we know very little about her life. I have done a lot of research on 17^th-century Spanish women and, in fact, much of my scholarly writing is on that subject. From my readings of women’s letters, stories by 17^th-century women authors, treatises on women by moralists of the period, and historical studies on women, I constructed a feisty, down-to-earth character who, like some of the real women I’ve studied, bucks the cultural norms of the period. Both she and Velázquez are deeply human characters, flawed, emotive, and capable of both wonderful and reprehensible deeds. 

OP: I Am Venus contains many parallels between 17^th century Spain and the modern world – political unrest, economic crisis, ongoing wars, scandal and hypocrisy, religious fanaticism. Do you think readers will see and understand these connections, and was it something you were aware of before writing the novel?

BM: I have taught 17^th-century Spain at Georgetown University for many years, and I’ve always been struck by how much that period resembles our own. Spain was deeply in dept, yet continued to spend, borrowing money from foreign creditors. It was engaged in multiple wars that drained the economy. Taxes and unemployment were high.  Veterans who returned from the Thirty Years War were unable to find jobs and sometimes didn’t get their pensions. Politicians and priests preached morality, yet engaged in lechery. Mores were changing. I don’t think readers can help but make connections. I think there are lessons to be learned from I Am Venus. In a sense, it could be seen as a cautionary tale.  

 

A New Anthology of Russia's Greatest Gothic Writers

Muireann Maguire's Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, a new collection of supernatural fiction featuring eleven short stories from both classic and lesser known Russian writers, is out later this week. Featuring nine pieces never before translated into English, the anthology combines many of the best-loved aspects of the traditional ghost story with the full Gothic repertoire of insanity, obsession, retribution, and terror.

In a starred review, Kirkus calls Red Spectres, "An excellent anthology of psych-and-spook mischief from behind the Iron Curtain, where a literature rich in such things held sway during the Soviet era." Over at Languagehat, Stephen Dodson recommends the book, "warmly to anyone with the slightest interest in stories of the uncanny, in early-twentieth-century Russia, or simply in good writing."

At her personal blog, Russian Dinosaur editor and translator Muireann Maguire has been walking readers through the back story behind her new book. In this excerpt from her ongoing "Translator's Tale" series, Maguire looks at some of the problems that confront any first time translator, as well as how she tackled these issues when it came to translating twentieth century Russian Gothic fiction. Click here to read the whole post!

"In the current (Spring #13) issue of the New Ohio Review, Rosamund Bartlett has a delightful short piece about the tribulations of translating Tolstoy. (She is currently completing a new version of Anna Karenina for Oxford World's Classics.) It describes her experience of 'spending a long time staring' at Tolstoy's 'inimitable, participle-laden, congested sentences'; two passages on bees prove particularly convoluted. Previous translators of AK produced their own unique versions of each sentence; they couldn't all be right. In the end, it was Bartlett's prior research into Tolstoy's hobbies (including, for some time, beekeeping) for her biography that helped her to unlock his prose: two peculiar verbs were exposed as highly specific beekeeping terminology, rather than ambiguous grammar. Another problem was Tolstoy's use of the singular noun pchela (bee) in a context that suggested multiple bees. Finally her 'apiarial research' led to the revelation that Tolstoy was, unusually but correctly, using pchela to signify an entire hive rather than a solitary insect. This insight allowed her to translate the 'bee passage' from Chapter Twelve of Part Two correctly, perhaps for the first time in the history of Tolstoy translation. One wonders what she would make of the Moscow/beehive passage in War and Peace.

I can't claim similarly research-intensive breakthroughs in my translation of Aleksandr Chayanov or the other authors featured in Red Spectres. However, I did repeatedly confront three perennial problems of translation: what do you do when your author's prose just isn't that good? How can you be sure you're getting it right? And, last but not least, how can you check whether to pay copyright fees? As every translator can be sure to stumble up against at least two of these, I'll describe my (fairly Jurassic) approach to all three."

A Forgotten Treasure Returns to Print

All true book lovers have that one favorite novel from way back when that has long since lingered out of print. You know, that single gem-of-a-book that has always been a favorite, yet remains relatively unheard of.

According to Phillip Pullman, the award-winning author of the celebrated children’s fantasy novel The Golden Compass, MacDonald Harris’s The Balloonist is one such read. First published in 1976, The Balloonist was nominated for the National Book Award and quickly became an international cult classic. The story, set in 1897, follows three men—Swedish scientist Gustav Crispin and his two traveling companions—as they set out in a hydrogen-powered balloon to be the first men to step foot on the North Pole. This richly imagined and gripping tale, much like the best of Jules Verne and Albert Sánchez Piñol blends Victorian science and sexual politics to brilliantly reinvent the Arctic adventure. Yet while the book was met with much acclaim, it has long since been unavailable in the United States. Until now.

            In his introduction to the long-awaited reprint of The Balloonist, Phillip Pullman expresses his praise for MacDonald Harris’s work and passionately writes of his excitement in seeing the classic tale returned to print: “MacDonald Harris (1921-1993) was the author of sixteen strikingly intelligent, interesting, and original novels, of which The Balloonist was probably the most successful. What amazes me, and has done so since I read this book when it came out in 1978, is that he’s not far better known.”

            “All his novels are extraordinarily interesting. And gripping, too: he knew how to arrest the attention and keep it, how to time the events of a narrative so that we can’t help turning just one more page.”

            “In The Balloonist, we see all of his qualities at their best….I hope that in the second voyage of publication, The Balloonist finds as many admirers as it deserves and that we shall see some more of this singular, elegant and witty novelist’s work restored to print. MacDonald Harris is too good to be neglected.”

Praise for The Balloonist:

“A delightful, quirky novel, "The Balloonist" is written in a dancing prose that matches the excitement of the enterprise.…When I finished reading, I found that I had put the heating on and wrapped a blanket around me. For a moment there I was quite ready to set out for the Pole myself.”

- Karin Altenberg, The Wall Street Journal

  

“A welcome reissue for this rich and strange novel which has languished in undeserved obscurity since narrowly missing the National Book Award in 1977 … much more, please.”

– The Guardian

“Some will consider [The Balloonist] to be the great ‘find’ of this year … it is the first of Harris’ novels to be reissued: it would be a shame if others did not follow.”

 – The Literary Review

THE ISLAND OF SECOND SIGHT: New York Times Review + Translator Interview

Albert Vigoleis Thelen's The Island of Second Sight received a glowing review in last weekend's New York Times Sunday Book Review. Today, translator Donald White joins us on the blog for an interview to discuss the first English language edition of what Thomas Mann once called "one of the greatest books of the twentieth century."

How did you first come across A.V. Thelen’s Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts?

It was actually quite fortuitous and undramatic. The private college in Massachusetts where I taught in the German Department had, and still has a remakably sizeable academic library with a generous book-ordering budget. One of my senior colleagues had ordered the original edition of Die Insel shortly after its publication in 1953, probably as part of an order of several post-war German-language novels. By the time I ran across the book sometime in the late 1970s, it had stood unconsulted on the library shelf in between works by August Thalheimer and Frank Thiess.

What made you embark on actually translating it?

The most cogent answer to this question can be found in the pages of Thelen’s book itself. I’ll quote from near the end of Chapter 23 of Book IV, where Vigoleis relates how he first discovered a major work by the Portuguese poet-philosopher Teixera de Pascoaes, who was later to become his and his wife’s personal protector during World War II:

I read the work in a single sitting, a feat that I rarely accomplish with any book, especially when the topic is religion…As I read on, I found myself mentally translating whole passages, assuring myself that I was going to transfer this book [Pascoaes’ treatise on St. Paul] into my own language.

That passage pretty well summarizes what I felt as I read the first hundred pages or so of the Insel. For one thing, outside of the 16^th-17^th –century baroque pages of Fischart and Grimmelshausen I had never before encountered such a free-wheeling display of the German language-such a willful, exuberant spectacle of vocabulary, much of it totally unfamiliar to me from any source in life or literature. That in itself provided motivation enough for a bilingual reader like me to take on the challenge of finding ways to render Thelen’s complex prose into readable English while preserving as much as possible of his signature style. Besides, in keeping with its title the work as a whole revealed an overall, subtle double aspect: an intriguing combination of high comedy and undercurrent of personal and historical melancholy. Finally, the sheer bulk of the work (over 900 pages in the original Diederichs edition) presented an additional challenge. Luckily, I took on the task of the translation entirely on my own time. I thus became, to borrow a term from Thelen himself, a long-distance translator, but unlike him during his years on Mallorca and beyond, facing no deadlines whatever.

I understand that you visited Thelen and his wife Beatrice during their later years. Did you receive help and encouragement from them for your translation?

I should stress that I worked on my translation, a labor of love if there ever was one, over many months and years, with no deadlines to face and with countless lengthy periods of inactivity. I completed the translation in early 2003, more than twenty years after picking the book off the shelf in our college library. 

On two different occasions during the 1980s I sent Vigoleis and Beatrice samples of my work, and accepted their invitation to meet with them, first in Lausanne, and later, a few short years before they both passed away, in Dulken, not far from where Vigo spent his childhood. They were very encouraging and Thelen agreed to help me out by mailing me replies to my queries concerning particularly arcane words and passages in the Island. Needless to say, I treasure the memory of those visits, and cherish the several letters he wrote to  me.

Can this work be compared to any other work of literature? If so, which?

For his deft handling of narrative tricks and his spirited humor, Thelen has often been compared-with some justification, I think-to such towering classics as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Tom Jones. Within the field of German literature, we can think of Grimmelshausen’s early picaresque masterpiece Simplizius Simplizissimus. The Insel was a best-seller in Germany for a time during its initial years, and a winner of the prestigious Fontane Prize in 1954. The book has never been out of print since the first edition of 1953. It continues to enjoy a small but devoted following among German-speaking readers. A few years after its publication, two German works of fiction appeared that have since overshadowed Thelen’s book: Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Confidence Man Felix Krull (1955) and Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1959). But the Insel, I am sure, will remain near the top of anyone’s list of great books of the 20^th century.

Why is it important that an English version of Thelen’s work should be published after all this time?

To my mind there is a quite significant historical aspect to Thelen and this book of his. All in all, it is the artistic record of a highly sensitive, non-Jewish German expatriate of the 1930s and beyond, recalling his and his beloved wife’s experiences in a Mediterranean “paradise”, told with a great deal of humor and genuine pathos. My English translation may help to change the rather negative picture of Germany and German literature that has prevailed in the UK and the USA for a long time. The Island of Second Sight is, I think, among many other things a living example of the fact that not everybody in Germany went along with Nazi ideology, and that not every German writer lacks a sense of humor.

‘The Island of Second Sight,’ by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

By ALAN RIDING

Published: October 12, 2012

It’s somewhat intimidating to review a book already described by Thomas Mann as “one of the greatest” of the 20th century — or so its publisher claims. It also seems odd that, despite Mann’s blessing, Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s picaresque romp, “The Island of Second Sight,” only recently became available in English — published in Britain in 2010, 57 years after its first appearance in German. But welcome it is. Without presuming to echo Mann, this is one of the most unusual and entertaining books I have ever read.

The cover announces that it’s a novel, although a subtitle inside (“From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis”) clearly identifies it as a memoir, specifically of the time Thelen and his Swiss wife, Beatrice, spent in Majorca between 1931 and 1936. Later German editions carry lengthy corrections, included in Donald O. White’s excellent translation, that suggest its author valued accuracy. That said, the narrator is not Thelen but his alter ego, Vigoleis, a nickname he earned at college.

Still, why should we care about a destitute German writer living on a Mediterranean island many decades ago? Because he has a narrative style that is variously farcical, byzantine and philosophical, and a sense of humor that makes light of countless catastrophes. Vigoleis also provides droll portraits — or are they caricatures? — of the friends, conspirators, eccentrics and enemies encountered on this madcap journey. And in its 730 pages, the book has ample room for digressions about life before and after Majorca. (Thelen died, at the age of 85, in 1989.)

Politics add darker variables. Then, as now, the island was much loved by German expatriates, retirees and tourists. And well before Hitler came to power in 1933, his shadow already divided its German community. At the same time, shortly before Thelen and Beatrice reached Majorca in 1931, the Spanish Republic replaced the monarchy. Right-wing agitation followed until General Franco plunged Spain into civil war in 1936. By then, things were too hot for Thelen and Beatrice. With both Nazis and fascists on their heels, they fled Majorca.

But five years earlier, their lives were shaped more by happenstance. Alerted by a cable from Beatrice’s brother in Majorca that reads, “Am dying. Zwingli,” they set off on a mission of mercy only to discover that Zwingli’s actual problem is a former prostitute with a furious sexual appetite who has left him a physical wreck. Zwingli insists that Vigoleis and Beatrice move in with him and his captor, the beautiful Pilar. Foolishly, they agree.

Beatrice’s savings are soon exhausted by Zwingli’s numerous creditors, who, upon discovering his sister’s loyal generosity, come banging on his door. More disturbing, however, is the flighty Pilar, who soon notices Vigoleis’s burning lust for her. One day, when they’re alone in Zwingli’s apartment, she lures our ardent narrator to her bedroom: “I was still attempting to strip away the last mundane trappings from my goddess, when the Divinity Herself bent down, grasped her right stocking and drew forth a dagger.” He panics. “She will make love to you,” he tells himself, “and then plunge the blade up to the hilt between your ribs.” After briefly wondering if there could be “a more beautiful death for a melancholy poet­aster,” he bolts. Only later, after Zwingli is treated for syphilis, does Vigoleis realize what else he has escaped.

In due course, having run out of money, Vigoleis and Beatrice are thrown out by Pilar and move into a crumbling guesthouse run by “a half-anarchistic, semi-­Catholic count” and peopled by an exiled Viennese actress, a sickly Dutch plantation owner, a disenchanted Prussian Army officer, assorted anarchists and a cook who keeps a pipe in her cleavage. Soon, unable to pay the rent, they find a roofless room in a brothel that services bullfighters and opium smugglers. When the rainy season floods their room, they find an apartment they cannot afford to furnish.

Things look up when they are hired to guide German day-trippers from their cruise ships to scenic points around the island. As it happens, Vigoleis, an outspoken anti-Nazi, dislikes most Germans and knows little about Majorca. But he is hungry, so he bites his tongue and invents his patter, not least at an abandoned monastery where Chopin and his mistress George Sand spent a miserable winter a century earlier. When some of his charges complain about the cafe they’ve been assigned to patronize at lunchtime, he explains: “Well, you see, in this house and on this balcony, Cervantes wrote his ‘Don Quixote,’ in 95 nights by the light of an oil wick. During the day he slept, as many writers do. This is sacred ground. Surely I need say no more.” Duly reprimanded, the Germans silently clean their plates.

Meanwhile, still more unlikely characters join the parade: the poet Robert Graves, whose book “I, Claudius” Vigoleis claims to have typed; Count Harry Kess­ler, an exiled German diplomat, who dictates his memoirs to Vigoleis; a fugitive Honduran general plotting a revolution back home; an American millionairess who believes Christian Science has cured her diseased kidney; a sex-crazed German Jewish. . . . Well, you get the idea.

When Franco launches his revolution in July 1936, Vigoleis and Beatrice are staying outside Palma, the island’s capital, initially unaware that the Franquistas are hunting down leftists and anarchists. Weeks later, Vigoleis learns he is on a death list and is presumed to have been murdered. Clearly it is time to leave.

To do so, Vigoleis needs his passport stamped by the Third Reich’s consul, who receives him with the words, “You? Haven’t you been shot?” Somehow Vigoleis gets his way. And, days later, with Beatrice by his side, he steps aboard a British destroyer evacuating foreigners. He is hiding 200 letters to be posted abroad and, by good fortune, the customs officer has overslept. Thanks, Vigoleis notes, to “some insatiable Spanish whore.”

Alan Riding is a former European cultural correspondent for The Times. His most recent book is “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.”