Читать книгу Apples and Oranges - Maarten Asscher - Страница 3

A TALE OF TWO SEAS

Kees Fens and Predrag Matvejević

A myriad of books have been supported with loving enthusiasm by their publishers only to find they don’t make the grade in commercial terms. In such instances, the appearance of the occasional review can offer considerable consolation to the publisher in question (not to mention the author and perhaps translator), particularly when it gives the stakeholders the impression that they did the right thing, at least in the opinion of a few kindred spirits. If the reviews don’t materialize, or those that do are downright negative, then there’s little left to do but harbor a grudge for years and wait for some other chance to get even. This is what I would like to do with a book entitled Mediteranski Brevijar (literally ‘Mediterranean Breviary’), written by the Croatian author Predrag Matvejević.

From the moment I got hold of the French Fayard edition (Bréviaire méditerranéen, 1992), I was fascinated by this exuberant and irrepressible homage to the sea of seas. Two years after the French edition, Tom Eekman’s Dutch translation was published by Meulenhoff on my own instigation under the title De Middellandse Zee. Een getijdenboek. The prologue, written by the Italian author Claudio Magris, describes the book as ‘masterful, original and brilliant’, qualifications with which I heartily agreed and still do.

Anyone trying to imagine what this book by Matvejević might be like should think of a work about the Mediterranean written by an author who represents a timeless amalgamation of Herodotus, Bill Bryson, Pliny the Elder, and Redmond O’Hanlon. The book, in short, is an endeavor to put together a sort of biography of the inexhaustible topography, history, natural and cultural abundance of ‘mare nostrum—our sea’, with the maximum curiosity, the maximum craving for detail and the maximum drive for completeness.

Since its original (Serbo-)Croatian publication in 1987, the book has appeared in more than twenty languages. The website of the University of California Press, the book’s American publisher, lists it under ‘Geography, Classics, Folklore & Mythology, Cultural Anthropology, European Studies, European History, Travel’. This is a meaningful enumeration for two reasons. In the first instance, there has to be something remarkable about a book of little more than two hundred pages that can apparently be relevant to so many different domains at one and the same time. In the second instance, Matvejević’s book can itself be seen as ‘one big summary’, and it is thus appropriate that the publisher’s commercial bibliographers maintain such an enumeratio in an effort to do justice to its unclassifiable versatility.

My disappointment and surprise were great, therefore, when Kees Fens, a literary critic I admire greatly, completely and utterly demolished Matvejević’s book in de Volkskrant on June 13th, 1994. I had secretly hoped that he would review it, entirely convinced as I was that it would appeal to him. But the man was unable to find a single good word to say about the book, with the exception of a word of praise for Tom Eekman’s translation. In my view, a confrontation between Fens’ crushing condemnation and my still sprightly enthusiasm for the book reveals something about ‘the Mediterranean’: as a mentality, an orientation, perhaps even a quality that people have or don’t have.

Predrag Matvejević was born in 1932 in Mostar, a city that acquired recent renown in Western Europe when the sixteenth century bridge over the river Neretva was destroyed during the 1990s Balkan conflict. Prior to his emigration to France, Matvejević taught French at the University of Zagreb and afterwards, Slavic languages at the Sorbonne in Paris. His existence thus made a 180 degree turn from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. Whatever the East/West significance may be, his book about the Mediterranean confirms him as a European. It won him the Premio Malaparte in Italy in 1991, and in the years that followed, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon.

The Bosnian city of Mostar is located fifty kilometers inland from the Adriatic coast. One could interpret Mediterranean Breviary as a large-scale endeavor to bridge this distance, rooted in a desire to compensate for the Mediterranean’s fifty kilometer deficit and still demand a birthright on its shores. Matvejević approaches this in three ways in his book, each corresponding to one of its three parts.

In the first part (‘Breviary’) he offers a comprehensive phenomenology of the Mediterranean in which he considers the sea’s various characteristics and its every phenomenon, great or small: bays, piers, harbormasters’ offices, fishing nets, algae, waves, winds, clouds, coasts, lighthouses, tar, figs, olives, sponges, islands, peninsulas, seagulls, river deltas, curses, languages, measures, methods of salt extraction, etc. On the basis of all these characteristics, an ample supply of stories and information floats to the surface. The cities on the Mediterranean coast, for example, did not begin life as villages but actually gave birth to the villages around them. The nature of a harbor, the author informs us, is determined by whether it was formed by a hinterland river or selected from the sea. Why is the Peloponnesus considered a peninsula, he asks, and not Tunisia? Or can we speak of sea migrations by analogy with those of peoples, birds, and fish? And what about the vanity of bays that sometimes pretend to be a sea in themselves, such as the Adriatic, which once bore the—more unassuming—name Golfo di Venezia. Or the similarity between lighthouse keepers and monks. Or the fact that the Sea of Marmara is saltier than the Black Sea. All useless facts and questions splendidly foisted upon us by the author.

In part ii (‘Maps’), Matvejević treats the Med like a cartographical library. We join him as he explores the lives and works of the major and minor mapmakers who have endeavored since time immemorial to capture ‘our sea’ on paper for the benefit of travelers, fishermen, seafarers, admirals, pirates, and last but not least, the sleuths who forage in our archives and catalogs. He charts islands, for example, that we will never be able to visit because they’re not surrounded by sea, but rather they close an imaginary gate: the northern Ultima Thule or the western Isles of the Blessed. One special category are the maps we know about only through the descriptions of others. We will never be able to reconstruct their magnificence, evocativeness, and precision. The maps also inspire Matvejević to recount the expeditions, wars, and campaigns of conquest organized by the Phoenicians and Greeks, Venetians and Arabs, Ottomans and Spanish, Carthaginians and Portuguese. How the Arabian cartographers drew their primary meridian through Mecca and located the south (‘our’ south) above it. How the great cartographers chose the theater and the mirror as their favorite metaphors when depicting the lands and seas of the ancient world: Theatrum orbis terrarum, Mirror of Seafaring. And about the centuries old connection between the sea routes and the position of the stars: Teatro del Cielo e della Terra. How geography in Antiquity became a critique of the novel; how the great Mercator promoted it to a critique of the imagination; and how Voltaire was ultimately to declare it a critique of the vanity of princes. Matvejević also interweaves his own observations with his archival and cartographical discoveries, sailing past Greek islands on the ship Dodekanesos. He provides a semi-tongue-in-cheek description of a geographer’s congress in Amalfi, where a commemorative exhibition of old compass roses was opened in honor of the Russian cartographer Leonid Barov (1881-1957) followed by an opportunity for discussion. This leads him to further digress on the relationship between the development of the compass and the history of the Mediterranean compass rose or wind rose. He closes the second part of his book with the following words: ‘The more we know about our sea, the less we look at it with our own eyes; the Mediterranean Sea isn’t a sea for the lonely.’

Having dealt with Mediterranean phenomenology and cartography, Matvejević turns in the third part of his book (‘Glossarium’) to the idiom of the Mediterranean Sea: the words, languages, dialects, and expressions associated with the Mediterranean basin. Just as the author did in going from part I to part II, he continues his argument with different means. His narrative descriptions and anecdotal digressions are now based on the countless names ascribed to the Mediterranean Sea, the multitude of ideas used to describe its individual gulfs, bays, and coves, and their etymological and historical roots. In doing so he not only uses encyclopedias and nautical handbooks, but also ships’ logbooks and travel accounts. Together with the author, we lament the loss of the ten volume Peri limenon (On Ports) by Timosthenes of Rhodes, admiral in the navy of Ptolemy ii Philadelphus.

Matvejević helps us compensate for the loss with his combination of evocative curiosity and imaginative associations. On the etymological relationship between ports as harbors and ports as doors or gateways, on sunken harbors as necropolises, on maritime cemeteries and their significance as a source of Mediterranean history. And islands, of course, including their historiographical and toponymic associations with classical, medieval, and later figures, up to and including Napoleon, Goethe, Trotsky, D.H. Lawrence, and Lawrence Durrell. This leads to incidental, but no less memorable nuggets of information, like the observation that the less a fish is valued as food the more names it tends to have. The author makes similar observations about the names and functions of herbs and olives, market squares and boulevards, souks and bazaars, weights and measures. This leads in turn to a fine reflection on the temperamental difference between the oriental bazaar and the Latin market. But a couple of pages later we’re back to the influence of crickets on the prosody of Hellenistic poetry and the question of which part of a seagull actually touches the surface of the water first: its breast, its claws, its beak, or its wings?

Such matters are important. They can keep you busy as you stare out to sea while the waiter brings you another glass of tea, an ouzo, or a local fig distillate. It’s hard to draw conclusions from them, but conclusions aren’t really necessary. In truth, and if we are to believe the book, nothing is necessary, but everything is worth studying and thinking about.

Matvejević’s breviary was clearly wasted on Kees Fens, as is unequivocally evident from his review. At the beginning of his piece he notes that he spent an entire day with the book, but ‘didn’t achieve perfection’. He diagnoses ‘verbal dandruff’ on the part of the author, a ‘mania for collecting and explaining’. He even opines here and there that he’s dealing with parody (without attempting to answer the interesting question: of what might the book be a parody?). He considers the book to be a sort of catalogue, but one that ‘means nothing’ and affords the reader no—new—insights. The book appears extremely profound, according to Fens, but ‘in fact it’s almost empty’. In his opinion it doesn’t provide any ‘real information’ and is little more than a ‘chain reaction of words’. ‘I’ve rarely read an author,’ he concludes admittedly with some wit, ‘who allows himself to be towed along by words to such a degree. […] There appears to be a lot. But if you read carefully there’s nothing to read.’ Fens explains this by arguing that ‘there is an absence of clarity and its associated pedagogical demands’. His final words: ‘Matvejević’s helmsmanship is the reason why the ship keeps turning on its axis. We never move forward. […] I was constantly thinking […] about the end of the journey. In the hope that its uniqueness would dawn on me. But there was no lighthouse up ahead, no beacon, no buoy, no harbor, no quay, no mooring berth. In short: there was nothing to hold on to. Nothing, that is, except the extraordinary talents of the translator Tom Eekman’.

In contrast to my own enthusiastic reading of Predrag Matvejević’s book, what Kees Fens’ brutal critique reveals is not only a difference of taste, of someone who admires a book vis-à-vis someone who detests it. There appears rather to be evidence of an unbridgeable divergence of minds. For Kees Fens, Mediterranean Breviary should have had a beginning as well as a middle and an end. More precisely, it should have had an ‘outcome’ that would have made ‘perfection’ achievable. Only then would the book have had meaning for him—mindful of the ‘pedagogical demands’—and only then would the reader have been granted something to ‘hold on to’ at the end of the book. But the very thing that draws me to Matvejević’s book and continues to enthrall me is its rambling character, its aimlessness, not its linearity (from beginning to end), but its circularity (rambling as a goal in itself). Its words move forward like waves suggesting a sea in the form of a book. After Fernand Braudel and hundreds of other authoritative histories of the culture, history and geography of the Mediterranean, what’s the point of more ‘useful information’ about ‘our sea’? I honestly wouldn’t know. But the fact that the inhabitants of Herculaneum didn’t swim on their backs or bellies but on their sides, as Erwin Mehl’s Antike Schwimmkunst (Munich, 1927) informs us, is the kind of unforgettable detail I particularly like to indulge, and of such details Matvejević is a most successful collector. So what inspired the horror that evidently took hold of Fens and refused to let him go for two hundred pages? The answer, it suddenly dawned on me, had to do with the difference between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, with Zandvoort on the North Sea coast, Kees Fens’ former hometown, and with the cultural differences that distinguish such a northern seaside resort from the southern reality of the Mediterranean.

In a country like the Netherlands, where the tulips line up every year, where the trees serve in the first place as protection against the wind from the sea, and where people think of the sea in terms of tides (and the climate in terms of rain), a book needs to offer something to hold on to, prove its perfection in the space of a day on the basis of the ‘useful information’ it yields. More than anything else, it has to ‘mean something’, otherwise it’s nothing. Don’t forget those ‘pedagogical demands’! Kees Fens painstakingly reminds us of these rigid rules and he’s right to proclaim them for all to hear, in the Netherlands that is. But in the culture of the Mediterranean, from which this book emerged and into which it immerses itself anew after reading, such practical necessities don’t count. A book doesn’t need to move from a to b in the Mediterranean. A Mediterranean book writes its own language drawing from the countless alphabets that have come into existence on its shores across the centuries. Instead of mercantile tulip bulbs, the Mediterranean has useless but glorious mosaics that have been waiting under the same sun for thousands of years for nothing in particular. The Mediterranean sun that reigns on high warms the tideless and capricious sea, inviting you to bob around in it without purpose until you decide with equal caprice that it’s time to get out of the water. Not because you’ve arrived at your destination, but because the position of the sun or the hollers from the pier suggest it. Or because you caught sight of a palm tree or a pine offering some welcome shade.

People go to the North Sea to walk up and down the beach, to go for a dip or take the ferry to England. And when they’ve done what they came to do, they go home. The Mediterranean Sea, by contrast, is a means rather than an end, a resource for life, a way of deciding where you stand with respect to the past and the present. The only pedagogical lesson it has to teach—and no one ever put it better than Kafavis—is that we’re always on the move, that perfection is not to be found in the goal of our journey, but somewhere along the way, and that it’s better to enjoy as much of what life has to offer as we live it. Otherwise there’s a danger that you’ll realize when you reach the end that you passed perfection long ago and didn’t notice. It sounds like a clash of clichés, and perhaps it is, but they’re clichés ‘kept for re-order’, as the old-fashioned photographer’s studio would have it.

The shortest summary of the gulf I’ve been describing is perhaps found in the Ladino saying Matvejević quotes on the last page of his book: ‘Dame al mazal e etcha me a la mar’, or ‘Make me happy and throw me into the sea’. For those who feel at home in Zandvoort on the North Sea, the idea of being ‘thrown into the sea’ will elicit thoughts of an involuntary cold bath to be resisted at all costs. But readers more inclined to the Mediterranean will happily yield to Predrag Matvejević and let him throw them into the Med. For no reason at all.