Torgeir,
Everything we read, at least everything I read, must deal with my
preconceptions. I attempt always to suspend disbelief, if disbelief is needed,
nevertheless . . . In the case of the excerpt, I knew that Enquist was born
just a few weeks before I was, and didn’t we all steal something from the local
grocery store back in those days? In my case I stole a candy bar when I was
five. I apparently didn’t unwrap it. When my mother discovered what I had
done, she sent me back to the grocery store (by myself) with instructions to
return the candy bar and confess my guilt; which I did; which bewildered the
store owner. It was apparently something he wasn’t used to. I was expecting a
different reaction, one that was going to hurt.
Then as to the roof falling in metaphor, my mother didn’t generate anything of
that nature until I was safely in the Marine Corps. My grandmother lived with
us and raised me until I was ten. After that my mother and father were
divorced. My mother became a clerk in the local Foodman grocery store and
married a truck driver who delivered supplies of food to the store. My
stepfather bought me my first bicycle shortly thereafter they were married
(when I was twelve) and I for the first time began exploring the neighborhood.
My mother didn’t become the sort of strict religionist that Enquist’s mother
was until later, and then it was as a follower of the cultish Herbert W.
Armstrong. She faithfully listened to his radio broadcasts and after she and
my stepfather were divorce she worked as a cook at Armstrong’s Ambassador
College in Pasadena California. Thus, my brothers and sisters, all younger
than I, were subject to her religious strictness. When I left the Marine Corps
and began study at a secular college, she and I used to argue theology –
something my siblings never did.
And so I wondered what Enquist’s reaction was to the roof falling. It sounds
as though it hurt. I wonder also if Enquist had siblings and how they reacted
to their mother’s views. In my case all my siblings gave in to her views while
they were living at home, but they didn’t continue in them after they moved
away. When I much later introduced Susan to my mother, I was by that time well
established as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas. My mother said that she often
wished that she had divorced my father after discovering his first infidelity.
That would have been before any of my siblings were born. She would then, she
told Susan, have focused all of her attention on her only child and turned him
into a preacher.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Torgeir Fjeld
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 2:44 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: A different life
new 1
Lawrence,
PO Enquist’s (autobiographical) A Different Life is tricky because of its
recurrent return to the historical present. In the Swedish it conveys an acute
sense of contemporaneity with the experiencing subject. It is in common usage
and not ungrammatical. However, in English this rhetorical technique can come
across as a bit laboured. Therefore, in translation it is better to make the
tenses more varied, shifting between the past and continuous present, and, as
we are prone to do when working from a Germanic tongue, turn the phrases more
“heavy on the right,” i.e. moving subordinate clauses and phrases to the end of
the sentence, as well as adhering to the Anglican avoidance of so-called run-on
clauses.
Would these considerations answer some your concerns regarding the excerpt? In
the Swedish Enquist completes the story by stating that “Then the roof falls
[or, alternatively, is falling] down.” However, the semantic sense (or so it
seems to this reader) is that the roof, metaphorical or concrete, falls as a
consequence of the meaning conveyed by the preceding story. It appears,
although input from native speakers is welcome on this issue, that in the
English a past tense construction is more appropriate, more readable, and more
conventional.
The excerpt makes further sense when connected to Enquist’s persistent
struggles with alcoholism. On reading it again it appears “obvious” (whatever
that phrase might mean) that Enquist here in some sense shifts the blame over
on his upbringing. Was it not his mother’s strictness that the grown-up Enquist
in reality was rebelling against when he turned to hard drinks, and, in the
light of the tyrannical and unreasonable nature of her approach to
child-rearing, was it not right of him to seek to overturn her values? Such, we
might conjecture, is the reasoning of a person struggling to explain and make
sense of their addictions.
Take care, -tor
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld <https://torgeirfjeld.com/>
~~ ereignis <https://ereignis.no/> : taking you to who you are ~~
On Tue, 28 Apr 2020 at 18:14, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Torgeir,
A provocative excerpt. One encounters what one at first believes is a metaphor
of a roof falling down standing for the mother learning that her son had not
stolen the caramel; although the nature of the store and the perception of the
grocery store owner causes speculation about how the store owner can be sure
that the boy did not steal a caramel. Were all the caramel’s accounted for?
Did the store owner have evidence that the boy never entered the store. Was
there another explanation?
On the other hand while the boy in his anxiety lied about stealing the caramel
in order to have a sin to confess. His mother may be unhappy that the
caramel-theft never happened, but now the boy, being caught in a lie, has a
true sin to confess. Why is the mother not pleased? It is puzzling why the
roof would fall in over the lie since the mother was anxious for the boy to
have a sin and now she has good evidence of one.
All this is so perplexing to this non-Swedish reader that I wondered if perhaps
I am misreading this event. Perhaps no metaphor was intended and the narrator
is describing the mother and store owner witnessing the grocery store’s roof
literally falling down.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Torgeir Fjeld
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2020 7:52 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] A different life
new 1
Every Saturday at bedtime he shall confess to a sin that he has committed
during the week, and consequently receive Jesus’ forgiveness. They have agreed
to it. It may have been mostly his mother who agreed to it, but in any case the
decision is there, and it has become a source of great anxiety to him, not
because confession in itself is difficult, but because he cannot recall
anything to confess. He realises that he simply is too good. As Saturday draws
nearer he mulls over his upcoming confession with increasing despair. He isn’t
able to find anything suitable to admit to, possibly because there isn’t
anything there to find. He considers sinning by design, just so as to have
something to confess, but goodness is too solid in him, kindness has grounded
itself like concrete, so that even such a path is impossible. Three consecutive
Saturdays he disappoints himself and his mother by not bringing any sin to the
table. Then he solves the dilemma by inventing a sin. With tears streaming down
his face he admits to stealing a caramel at the Coop in the Waterfall when the
grocer was looking somewhere else. His mother is shattered by the confession,
but heaps praise on him for having confessed, and after their prayers they fall
peacefully asleep as Jesus Christ has certainly forgiven the sinner. What he
hadn’t considered was that the following week his mother would tell the grocer
about the sin; she knows him well from their common and active leadership of
the Blue Ribbon Organisation for Sobriety. She tells him that her child has
stolen a caramel. That was when the roof fell down.
From Per Olov Enquist (1934-2020), Et annat liv [A Different Life], Stockholm:
2008.
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld <https://torgeirfjeld.com/>
~~ ereignis <https://ereignis.no/> : taking you to who you are ~~
