Living Tissue, 10x10 (Moldovan Literature) - Softcover

Galaicu-Paun, Emilian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628973382 ISBN 13: 9781628973389

Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

With each chapter embodying a separate Commandment, Living Tissue, 10x10 is both a Decalogue and a ribald, exuberant, deliriously inventive postmodern Decameron, which covers four decades in the life of the protagonist, unfolding against the backdrop of Soviet and post-communist Moldova, from the untimely death of Yuri Gagarin in 1968 to the so-called “twitter revolution” of 2009. Tens of tragical, comical, fantastical, historical tales intertwine, punctuated by the endless upheavals suffered by twentieth-century Moldova. But the narrative also takes euphoric flight, in episodes that travel as far afield as Paris, Moscow, and Tibet. In Living Tissue. 10x10, Emilian Galaicu-Păun engages in literary origami, bending and blending together real and fictional worlds, abolishing up and down, here and there, past and present, as if in an Escher engraving, alternating narrative techniques, braiding myth, history and literary allusion, transgressing the boundaries of languages and cultures to create a rapturously intricate novel in ten dimensions.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Emilian Galaicu-Păun (b. 1964) is a poet, essayist, translator and editor-in-chief of the Cartier publishing house, Chișinău. Author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, his work has been widely translated, including the upcoming anthology Chanting Arms, translated by Adam J. Sorkin. His first novel, Gestures. A Trilogy of Nothing, was published in 1996. Living Tissue. 10x10 is his second novel.

Alistair Ian Blyth, a native of Sunderland, England, has resided for many years in Bucharest. His previous translations include The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepenaeg, The Encounter by Gabriela Adamesteanu, and I'm an Old Commie! by Dan Lungu, all available from Dalkey Archive Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A checked handkerchief―échiqueté, in heraldic terms―which the stranger pulls from the pocket of his blue jeans to hand to the girl, thinking of Georges Bataille’s Simone, from The Story of the Eye, and she wipes the pearly liquid dribbling down her thighs after dipping her bare bottom in the cat’s saucer of milk; the ancestral, natural gesture with which she wipes up there―“Is that blood?!”―as if she had been making love in the open air since the world began; the raw wound, having now died of pleasure and been resurrected by the presentiment of fresh desire, yawning open to overflow its edges like an eye astonished at what is happening to it; the perfume imbues the fabric, the perfume of an orange stuffed with cloves, that cuneiform script―deriving from cunnus, obviously, as follows: “Peter, quid est cunnus? Locus pessimus atque profundus”―the fabric folded in four, so that once unfolded its axial symmetry can be read plainly. “Watch your mouth!” The sentence barely having formed on his lips abruptly emerges feet-first. “After all, you’re hardly a seedbed of maidenheads, nor I a Hymengway!”

“Old Maid Inc. Special orders for traditional weddings & one-night brides,” her riposte, sharper than might have been expected, causes him to rue his words.

“Laisse tomber,” he capitulates. “Instead let me tell you about how I lost my innocence. Blood for blood, as it were. But bear with me.” The girl darts him a glance, one of those swift looks that hit their target no matter how hard you try to fend them off. He ought to look like a mammoth from the cave at Altamira, given how many times he has been struck right in the face, were it not that, in its phylogenesis, the flesh has transformed the darts into as many pores, each with a delicate strand of hair on top, through which his entire being is exhaled.

“And do you know with whom?” A theatrical pause, long enough to read on his lips: “Because I hardly kept a candle burning for you . . .” The question makes her burst into complicit laughter, in memory of the Night of Perfumed Candles, their first―their unforgettable. But now it is his turn to emit a warlike whoop: “With Lenin!” And without giving her time for an answer apposite: “You, whatever you were called at the time, what were you doing in 1971?”

. . . no earlier, since it wasn’t until ’70 that they struck the commemorative one-ruble coin with the face of I. V. Lenin (1870-1924). He had two of them, brand new, and wouldn’t have parted with them for anything in the world, had not a man and a woman crossed their threshold one spring afternoon, soaked from head to foot, each with a knapsack on their shoulders. They were roaming the villages of the Soroca plain, begging, after the Dniester burst its banks and washed away their house and chattels. They looked so wretched that the child hid behind the oven in fear, whence at irregular intervals he heard the voice of his grandfather asking them one thing and another―peasants born and bred, authentic to the soles of their feet, they recognized each other by their smell, like farmyard animals; if the gypsies came to their door, they would have slammed it without a word!―before placing in their sack “what God has given.” Old rags, a handful of flour, runner beans. They were about to leave, they had even exhausted their stream of “God bless you! God bless you!” when Grandma called him by name―a name same as hers, except in the diminutive―to come to her and give her what he had in his little pouch. Thitherto he had never heard the saying, “money is the devil’s eyes,” but that was all his grandmother said to him as she took his two rubles, the way you might snip off the balls of a male piglet. He never forgave her and when warmer weather came and his grandmother set about repairing her stove (which is to say, sealing all its cracks by plastering it with horse flop, after trailing along behind the arse of “Năstică’s” horse for a whole week―Năstică, the village carter, was a kind of relative, who got his nickname from the rhyming insults that his wife used to fling at him, such as: “Năstică, Năstică / tu nu știi pe lume nică!” [Năstică you stupid lout / you don’t know nowt], until her nastiness finally drove him to suicide a few years later), he told her to her face: “Grandma, you’re a cow with boots on!” Days unnumbered―excepting those when Grandpa dated his letters to his son, an officer in the Soviet Army on the point of finishing his service, with the invariable closing words, penned in capital letters, in his preschooler’s hand: “. . . AND A RETURN SAFE AND SOUND”―days in which he did nothing but grow. 22nd of the 6th. 7 years. First birthday celebrated at home. Taste of cheap wine on the tongue. Slight dizziness―“Lordy, the world’s spinning ’round! . . .”―and the inexpressible feeling that everything was just beginning, if it hadn’t ended already.

Anyway, the cock crowing on the threshold to announce guests, its blood chasing around the yard after Grandma perfunctorily lopped its head from its body, and the bird managed to wrest itself from her gnarled hands, filling the yard with Pollock paintings. “It’s running away from death,” his voice burst out of the blue, somehow against his will, as if an angel had blown on a silver trumpet, “but he still won’t get away!” Another time, he was supposed to have chased after the bird, who knows whether he even managed to catch it, but this time, after an angel came out of his mouth―as Grandma would have put it―you might say it dogged death’s every step. Later―the cock was simmering in the pot over a low flame, lest the flesh fall from the bones; the soil outside had wiped its mouth clean, that was that; the notch of another soul was added to the cherry tree stump in the middle of the yard―his parents made their entrance, arriving “from Rossiya” via Ch―ău, his father dressed militarily, his mother dressed maternally. He realized they had arrived from the commotion out in the yard, and here he is running from the bottom of the garden with his short trousers still around his ankles―the moment, so long awaited, had caught him doing his business―so that he almost fell and broke his head, shouting at the top of his voice: “Mama and Dada! Mama and Dada!” Of that afternoon he will still recollect Grandma’s gesture as she raised her hand to her mouth, as if he of all people ought not to hear what he had always known: “Blood is thicker than water . . .” All of a sudden, amid the festiveness, he vaguely sensed a barracks- like atmosphere: Dada was giving clipped orders, starting with hand-washing―he may also have uttered the word “cholera,” unless some other, subsequent memory has not overlaid the events of that day, a memory from when Grandpa was admitted to the county hospital with a simple case of diarrhoea―and also supervising the orderly progress of operations to ensure collective hygiene. Oh! with what zeal did he soap them, as far as the elbows, as if pulling on a pair of long bridal gloves, so that they would be to his father’s liking before he presented them: “Lenin’s hands!” Nobody had taught him to call them that, he hadn’t even been as far as the next village, C―ii de Sus, where, inside a special glass display case at the heart of the settlement, there was a miniature replica of the Kremlin office, with Ilyich busily writing by the light of a lamp with a green shade that burned all night long; on the contrary, Grandma immediately muttered: “To hell with him, the Yid!” which drew the prompt admonishment of her son: “Mama, don’t talk like that in front of the bairn!” But as for the bairn, the child was no longer a child. Without it being known, he had just repudiated the grandmother whose name he bore and knowingly devoted himself to belief in the Father in whose basilica he knelt. “Thou shalt have no other gods before...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1628973382
• ISBN 13: 9781628973389
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 310
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland