From the original Croatian and Estonian

In a country which pays too little attention to translating the literature of other European nations, MacLehose Press stands out as a beacon of integrity and inspiration. Its driving force, veteran publisher Christoper, formerly of Harvill Press, has brought out two volumes of Estonian grand master Jaan Kross's Between Three Plagues trilogy, the first instalment of which I praised here, and he strongly recommended The Czar's Madman

while Boyd Tonkin's review of the late Daša Drndić's penultimate novel, Belladonna, on The Arts Desk, turned me back to a  MacLehose publication I was afraid to approach, for good reason, her Trieste.

I suppose this could best be described as documentary fiction. I'm presuming that the protagonist and her family, including her long-lost son, are creations to serve Drndić's key concern that most people are passive bystanders, trying not to know too much about the horrors around them, who end up being incurably lacerated by events.

Life is stronger than war. For most people, the obedient and the silent, for those on the sidelines, for the bystanders, life becomes a small, packed suitcase that is never opened, an overnight bag slipped under the bed, baggage going nowhere, in which everything is neatly folded - days, tears, deaths, little pleasures, spreading the stench of mould. For those on the sidelines there is no telling what they are thinking, whose side they are on, because they do nothing but stand and watch what is going on around them as if they don't see a thing, as if nothing is happening, as if there is nothing going on...their self-deception is a hard shield, a shell in which, larvae-like, they wallow cheerfully.

The fate of Gorizia-born Haya Tedeschi is interwoven with the real nightmare of SS man Kurt Franz, the beast of Treblinka (pictured below), and Drndić is concerned to the point of obsession to drum into our head unalterable facts and names that might otherwise have been lost. In this she reminds me of the Polish guide who took us round Auschwitz - no rhetoric, no emotion, just 'remember this'.

The cynical might say that 'the names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy or killed in Italy [and?] in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945', taking up 43 pages of the book with four columns to a page, could be seen as space-filling, an easy way of fulfilling a commission for a book of a certain length. I'm sure the memorial is absolutely sincere, as are Drndić's selective facts about the key Nazi players and the evidence (or lack of it) they later give.

Drndić is ruthless in her chronicling of facts that still seem too surreal to be true: the Nazi control of every aspect of sex in people's lives, the prototype sex dolls called Borghild to be produced in three types, the service brothels (which we know something of through the film Salon Kitty), the raising of 'pure Aryan children' taken away from their parents which is the theme of the book's last third. And this is especially devastating, the unresolved sense of injustice, the mass-murderers freed prematurely from prison or never going there, the sense of horror within the victims, passed on to the next generation. It is indeed a 'joyless book', as Drndić wrote in the dedication to my partner 'with joy'.

And yet there is sympathy for the victims, which include places as well as people. Trieste, where the San Sabba Mill is the scene of the utmost horror,

does not want to die without a fight. It struggles to survive as best it can. Abandoned by Italy in 1943, it flails and succumbs, distraught....The morass inside it is deep and dark and sick, so sick that no-one and nothing dares go there, so all-embracing that Trieste itself is engulfed.

Yet cities change, like people. I had no inkling of all this in a serene time there, and now I feel a bit guilty for not knowing. Just as it is hard to reconcile the present dissolved border, across which we walked from Italy into Slovenia over a mountain pass with an unguarded customs post, with the scenes of such terrible conflict and bloodletting, so that the uncanny blue of the River Socac turned red with blood. 

We now understand more than ever - and for my generation it has come as a terrible shock - barbarism is always at the gates, released from the dark souls of people. Jaan Kross knew the terrible force of Russian repression, imprisoned by the Soviets for speaking truth to power just as the 'madman' of his novel's title, Count Timotheus von Bock, was incarcerated for challenging Alexander I to reform.

The action moves between the present house watch of 'Timo' on his Estonian estate after his 'release' by Nicholas I and the awful past of his captivity and torture, with the narrator, his craven brother-in-law, representing opportunism and the craven acceptance of injustice. It is just this view of Timo's courageous demands as insane which contributes to a perception of madness. One brief sample of dialogue will suffice to show Kross's technique of the 'unreliable narrator' at work. Timo is trying to explain his actions to his wife and her brother:

'...I am still convinced that whatever one may think of my action, subjectively, it also had its objective side. And objectively, it could have given the impetus for a rebirth of Russia. If the Czar had proven to be the man I mistakenly believed him to be. I was, of course, aware of the possibility of that mistake all along, and that was why I was ready for anything, from the very beginning.'

I found the selfish smoothness of his arguments a little trying.

'Even for having your teeth smashed?' I asked him.

'Jakob!' Eeva cried out, in a strangely horrified tone. For a moment I thought (we human beings are prone to absurd notions) that a reminder concerning Timo's teeth might act as a kind of trigger to release his demented train of thought, and that Eeva knew this. But Timo's reply was restrained, almost calm:

'Yes. Even for that. ..or maybe not - really... Because I did believe, after all...'

Both these books are masterly. Do read them. And let's thank Ellen Elias-Bursać and Anselm Hollo for their labours of love in translating them.

Ulysses on Samos

The year in which we coincidentally visited three of James Joyce's cities - Dublin, Trieste and Zurich - had to see the end of my odyssey through Ulysses. I wouldn't be defeated as I had been nearly thirty years ago, inter-railing to Italy, when I must have reached about the two-thirds mark but remember nothing except the phrase 'agenbite of inwit'.

Once I'd resolved to read an 'episode' a day in perfect holiday circumstances, with the aid of Jeri Johnson's commentary to the Oxford reprint of the original 1922 edition, and found I could do it in Switzerland, there was no stopping me. Especially as this time I found so much of it engaging, human and very funny.


Yet the conclusion of that particular trip brought a full stop to concentrated reading: too much hurly-burly here in London to find the right space. So having been engrossed by Leopold Bloom's reasoned altercations with Fenian bigotry in 'Cyclops', it wasn't until I was installed on the balcony of our Potami retreat in Samos that I reached Sandymount Strand at 8pm and Bloom's onanistic viewing of lame, would-be-genteel Gerty MacDowell.

Since JJ always starts each narrative from an exhausting new stylistic point of view, reading Ulysses is never calm sailing. The journey through the history of Eng Lit in Holles Street Maternity Hospital is bewildering; I found I sometimes just had to let my mind go slack over the flow of words. Johnson has a point here: you worry that you can't see the wood for the trees, but the trees are the wood. And then I thought I was going to relish the dream-drama of 'Circe', but found it just went on and on - which is, I suppose, nightmarishly the point.

Reaching the final harbour was easier, and again it's no doubt Joyce's intention that after the Goethean brothel Walpurgisnacht the often amusing dialogues in the cabbies' shelter should come as a breath of fresher air. And then we go to the other extreme with the didactic lunacy of 'Ithaca'. Fortunately there's raunchy, Rabelaisian Molly with her filthy talk and her forgiving view of humanity to provide a surprise feminine coda. Which I finally reached on the plane from Athens to London. How strange that we were flying over beloved Trieste


and Paris; that the end-date was palindromic (01/11/10); and that I finished my reading at 10.10pm. And then, onwards to Bulgakov, the engrossing family chronicle of Ludmila Ulitskaya's Medea and Her Children, and more Moominmadness at bedtime.

My thanks to the quietly inspirational Fritz Senn in Zurich for keeping me on the Joycean road.

Joyce and Svevo in Trieste

There they are, Trieste's two most original literary chroniclers, among the many statues in the public gardens described by Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz, a typical Triestine mix - the nom de plume marries Italian and Swabian roots) as 'that greenery which seems so pure in the midst of the grayness of the streets and houses that surrounds it'.

I confess that this will be a very patchy entry, as I hardly trailed around the Joyce sites in Trieste much more than I did the ones in Dublin (in that instance, not at all). And I'm only halfway through Svevo's putative masterpiece, Zeno's Conscience, which so far has disappointingly little about the city in which it's set, though it does make me laugh from time to time.

Still, we'd just come back from the Julian Alps and Udine in time for Bloomsday, 16 June. There was a happening of sorts starting at the Urban Hotel Design, somewhat chaotic as these Italian esposizioni usually are. In a very crowded room, a man in a straw hat clowned around a bit on a whistlestop reading of Ulysses with musical interludes. We were shown films of the four artists involved in the 'projetto', one of whom made fun of picking up Ulysses, putting it down and declaring that Joyce could go hang; Svevo was the man for him (the two are not unconnected: Joyce saw Svevo into print and is even supposed to have modelled Leopold Bloom on his Triestine drinking buddy). Here are a couple of Luigi Tolotti's digitally elaborated collages.



Then we went walkabout, up to the street with the Augustan arch, but it had all fizzled a bit and so the two of us branched off and headed back for the harbour.


Joyce lived with Nora Barnacle in no less than nine poky apartments in the vicinity as a struggling writer and Berlitz School English teacher, fascinated by the Triestine dialect and the red-light district, both of which are supposed to have found their way into Ulysses - a book with a double consciousness split between Trieste and Dublin. He also spent hours absorbing the Greek orthodox liturgies in the Church of San Nicolo dei Greci.


It was brilliantly illuminated by the late afternoon sun when we visited, especially when the west door swung open. The young sacristan was very welcoming, and told us how large a community it still hosted on a Sunday morning.


We spent one of our four nights at the James Joyce Hotel in the old city - quiet, clean, rather dark and not bad value for money. Of course I have to show you the toiletries.


Even so, for our last night we returned to the hotel recommended by blogging pal Willym, Le Corderie, high on the hill and quite a hike from the centre of town (though weaving up and down through the backstreets, we caught some marvellous art nouveau). Le Corderie is modern, filled with books in every room, and boasting two especially delightful members of staff in the incredibly vivacious Edwiga and the very nice girl who served us breakfast on the terrace and gave us extra helpings of cherries. And what a breakfast it was - our new friends certainly weren't wrong about that.


But how have I got from high literature to food? I can't say that Svevo's Zeno would have especially approved - the idle, neurasthenic and hypochondriacal merchant's son is much more interested in cigarettes.

Winckelmann in Trieste

The name won't mean much even to the few tourists who visit the loveliest corner of Trieste - and there were none on the morning we wandered around in the baking sun puzzling out how to find the entrance to the Museo Civico which lodges the Winckelmann Memorial


in its Lapidary Garden.


So what does Johann Winckelmann mean to me? Really not much more than a name, somewhat mocked in Richard Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece for his dogged insistence that Greek art was all 'noble simplicity and calm grandeur' and his 'peeping Tom' view of the original Athenian gymnasiums with their naked youths as an education in 'the beauty of forms'. Walter Pater pinpointed Winckelmann's partial view when he declared that 'the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture, but loses sight of the sombre world against which it strikes.'

Alas for Winckelmann, the 'sombre world' did for him after only eight days in Trieste, when the young Italian he'd taken up with murdered him. Troubled rent-boy or thief pure and simple? We'll never know, though Winckelmann's homoerotic dithyrambs sugges the former. Anyway, according to Jan Morris in my current bible, 'all educated Europe, we are told, was saddened by the news of his death - "universal mourning and lamentation", Goethe wrote'. The cenatoph, Morris adds, was 'erected under the patronage of an emperor, three kings and a grand duke,



containing a fine marble image of Dr Winckelmann and sundry examples of the busts, torsos, thoughtful muses and fragrant heroes of his enthusiasms'. Eheu, fugaces.




There are some fine sculptural fragments around the Lapidary Garden, too, including this fragment, one of three from the nearby site of Aquileia which we must visit next time.


And the Museum proper is charming, obviously benefitting from a recent injection of cash and proud of the Egyptian collection assembled by a couple of distinguished Triestine archaeologists. It's not at odds with the memorial strain here to feature four very handsome canopic jars, those mysterious god-as-animal-headed containers for the intestines:





All these pictures: maybe we need Debussy's 'Canope' from the second book of Preludes to absorb them by. I'd choose Zimerman if pressed, but as I have his Preludes on the shelves, let's hear great Gieseking.



By pure serendipity, I've just discovered that 'Canope' is also among the selected preludes on a 1967 Richter recital disc for which I'm just about to write the notes. And apart from the Festival Hall hackers and coughers, it's spellbinding.

Just two more items from an absorbing collection, which we didn't have time enough to see at length before the museum shut at noon. Here's the rim of a funeral jar from one of the prehistoric sites of the local Castellieri civilization up in the karst


and the museum's real treasure, though not from around here: a fifth century BC rhyton from Tarentum.


All these aides memoires I needed, by the way, because they didn't have any postcards, and even the guide book was sold out. A shame: it's a wonderful little museum and I'd like to have known more about its collectors.

Triestine temples

That's to say, of worship, commerce, consumerism, refreshment and feline sanctuary. Where better to start than the west front of Trieste's Duomo on the hill and down to the synagogue, one of the biggest in Europe and flamboyantly constructed in 1910?

Ancient Trieste plays little part in Jan Morris's inspirational meditation on city and self because, as she fairly says, 'I long ago conceived my own idea of this city's real purpose', and that essentially begins with Maria Theresa's Hapsburgian free port. The Romans do of course briefly come into it, because Mussolini's Fascists made quite certain to draw parallels with their own regime, restoring the forum in front of the cathedral and plonking their giant headquarters bang opposite the similarly reconstructed Roman theatre. Most Triestine's favourite ancient sight is the misleadingly called the Arco di Riccardo - but the Lionheart never was confined here, apparently - put up to honour Augustus in 33 AD.


Anyway, since Morris doesn't purport to be a guidebook, you won't learn from her that the Duomo boasts, either side of its hideous 1930s-decorated chancel apse, two of the loveliest old mosaics in Italy. This one, from the 13th century, depicts Christ flanked by one of Trieste's two resident Saints, Giusto, drowned in the bay with a lead weight attached to his neck, and St. Servulus.


Note the fabulously pretty decorated border, especially the bit beneath Christ's dove-refreshed feet:


Like everything else in Trieste, the Duomo is a bit of this, a bit of that. Essentially its Byzantine pillars are fine and its atmosphere, at least when we visited on a warm evening, very peaceful (oh dear, yes, the word everyone writes in church visitors' books, but isn't it what many of us agnostics want from a space like this?)


There's a chapel with a tomb for the last of the Spanish pretenders - the Carlists were here - and an eccentric bit of 20th century composite work on the west front, incorporating - rather brilliantly, I think - six busts from a Roman tomb, three on either side of the entrance.


Winckelmann's monument next door I'd better save for another entry: its surrounding sculpture garden is surely the most enchanting corner in all Trieste.

And what of the synagogue? It holds itself proudly, not hidden away as it would be in other cities, symbol of an unusually proud and happy diaspora, an invaluable mercantile input, for 150 years.



Sadly, a civic committee which tried to get them all out to Palestine in the early 1930s went unheeded by many, and 700 were deported and/or killed. But there's now a thriving Jewish community in Trieste which helps to keep the massive synagogue going (and millions must have been spent on the restoration, which looks as new). A Greek congregation also packs out the Church of San Nicolo on Sunday mornings, a favourite ritual for James Joyce to attend when he was here. We popped in briefly on our way to the station, but the previous day we'd inspected and been made very welcome by the attendant.


Within a couple of hundred yards there's also the Serbian Orthodox church of San Spiridione and the neoclassical Sant'Antonio, another thriving hub of worship when we visited and closing the view up the Canal Grande.


We broke up our tour of this part of town with a coffee and tramezzini in one of Trieste's two most celebrated cafes, the Tommaseo.


It's the earlier of two major irredentist haunts and named after the celebrated patriot who launched many of his most impassioned speeches here.



Despite the presence of a few old locals here, I much preferred the darker haven of the Cafe San Marco just around the corner from the synagogue (many of whose worshippers were welcome here).


It was opened in 1914, burnt down in an anti-Austrian protest and now retains its atmosphere, again a little bit for tourists but mostly for the residents, who enjoy film shows and concerts in one of its long halls.


The San Marco feels very Viennese, partly by virtue of the Klimtian gilding but also because of the celebration of world theatre in its little round panels.



Svevo and Joyce both loved it, and so did I.

A quick whizz, then, through other churches of sorts: mercantile splendour


furs with reflected art nouveau extravagance in the heart of the shopping district


and finally sanctuary for the city's enormous cat population. We saw a number of little old ladies, one very elegantly dressed in twinset and pearls, putting out lavish fish and pasta suppers in bowls. In the courtyard of the huge old Hapsburgian hospital, still in run-down use, numerous shelters have been made for the feline inhabitants - do they keep the mouse and rat population down, I wonder? - and food is never short.


And this complacent puss was to be seen night and day basking beneath his protector's shrine high on the hill every time we walked past.


Morris has got it exactly right, I think: 'in Trieste animals are rarely scared of humans, to my mind a sure sign of civic integrity, come wealth or poverty, fame or ignominy, empire or dictatorship or Autonomous Region'. Brava.