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kaitmannix's review
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
1.0
arirang's review
4.0
Stories of slavery do not interest us much. Literature rarely holds forth on this subject. However, here, bitter lands of sugar, we feel overwhelmed by this knot of memories that sours us with forgettings and shrieking specters. Whenever our speech wants to take shape, it turns toward remembrance, as if drawn to a wellspring of still-wavering waters for which we yearn with an unquenchable thirst. Thus did the story of that slave old man make its way to me. A history greatly furrowed by variant stories, in songs in the Creole tongue, wordplay in the French tongue. Only multiplying memories could follow such a tanglement. Here, careful with my words, I can proceed only in a light rhythm, floating on those other musics.
Linda Coverdale's wonderful translation of Martinique author Patrick Chamoiseau's L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse was the winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award, under its US title Slave Old Man.
(for some reason the British title is The Old Slave and the Mastiff and the American one Slave Old Man - can't understand why neither could pick the obvious Slave Old Man and the Mastiff)
Now I have to admit that I struggled with my one previous Patrick Chamoiseau novel, his Prix Goncourt winning Texaco, translated by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov (see Garth Risk Hallberg's take here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/15/garth-risk-hallberg-texaco-patrick-chamoiseau-how-fiction-new). I could understand Milan Kundera's hailing of the novel as "Truly poetic ... the unbridled improvisation of a storyteller who is swept along by his own talking and who oversteps the frontier of the plausible when he wants to — joyfully, and with quite stunning ease," but can't say I really understood much of what I was reading.
Slave Old Man and the Mastiff (I'm going to use my own title) more satisfying, thanks to Linda Coverdale's wonderful job in not only translating the mixture of French and Creole into her own lyrical register, but providing an introductory note, afterword and a number of helpful footnotes (reading on a Kindle made referring to these a pleasure), which, combined, are half the length of the novel itself.
Coverdale explains in her introduction, how Creole was developed by Caribbean slaves both as a fusion of the Babel of their tribal and European langauges, but it also allowed plantation storytellers to say far more than 'their listening masters could ever understand', using the language, as Chamoiseau says in his Creole Folktales, in a way ‘that is opaque, devious – its significance broken up into a thousand sibylline fragments’, and she effectively incorporates the Creole into her text, often providing a word followed by its English translation (djok-strong), or adding a small additional gloss.
Each chapter (cadence in Chamoiseau's terminology) of the novel begins with a passage from works by [a:Édouard Glissant|5461517|Édouard Glissant|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1390996850p2/5461517.jpg], a foundation figure of Martinique and indeed Caribbean literature, putting Chamoiseau's novel in dialogue with his, as well as a poetic epigraph from an anonymous work Touch.
So the novel opens:
(from Glissant)
There is, before the cabin, an old man who knows nothing of ‘poetry’ and in whom the voice alone resists. Grizzled hair on his black head, he bears in the mêlée of lands, in the two histories, before-land and here-land, the pure and stubborn power of a root. He endures, he treads the fallow land that yields not. (His are the deeps, the possibilities of the voice!) I have seen his eyes, I have seen his wild lost eyes seeking the space of the world.
then:
Immobile dreams of bones
of what was, is no more,
and yet persists in the foundation of an awakening
Touch
folio I
and the novel proper:
In slavery times in the sugar isles, once there was an old black man, a vieux-nègre, without misbehaves or gros-saut orneriness or showy ways. He was a lover of silence, taster of solitude. A mineral of motionless patiences. Inexhaustible bamboo. He was said to be rugged like a land in the South or the bark of a more-than-millennial tree. Even so, Word gives us to understand that he blazed up abruptly in a beautiful bonfire of life.
the original French:
Du temps de l'esclavage dans les isles-à-sucre, il y eut un vieux-nègre sans histoires ni gros-saut, ni manières à spectacle. Il était amateur de silence, goûteur de solitude. C'était un minéral de patience immobile. Un inépuisable bambou. On le disait rugueux telle une terre du Sud ou comme l'écorce d'un arbre qui a passé mille ans. Pourtant, la Parole laisse entendre qu'il s'enflamma soudain d'un tel boucan de vie.
The novel is set on a Martinique sugar plantation and its group of slaves:
The Plantation is small, but each link among its memories vanishes into the ashes of time. The bite of the chains. The rwasch of the whip. The rending cries. Explosive deaths. Starvations. Murderous fatigues. Exiles. Deportations of different peoples forced to live together without the laws and moralities of the Old-world. All of that quickly muddles, for those gathered there, the rippling of recollections and the depth-sounding of dreams. In their flesh, their spirit, subsists only a calalou-gumbo of rotting remembrance and stagnant time, untouched by any clock.
Every month or so one of the younger slaves succumbs to a fevered desire to escape, and flees into the jungle, where they are pursued and inevitably caught by the Master and his huge and savage dog, the mastiff.
There was, as happened almost every month, a young nègre convinced he was wilier than his predecessors and who was hit out of the blue by la décharge. I am going to tell you about the décharge. The old slaves knew about this: it was a bad sort of impulsion vomited up from a forgotten spot, a fundamental fever, a blood clot, a désursaut pas-bon: a not-good jump-up, a shivering summons that jolted you raide off the tracks. You went around being taken to pieces by an impetuous inner presence. Your voice took on a different sound. Your gait grew gently grotesque. A religious flutter set your cheeks and eyelids trembling. And your eyes bore the customary fiery marks of awakened dragons.
The eponymous Slave Old Man is, to outside appearances, placid and content in his lot, the fixer who makes everything function smoothly (one he is gone many minor hitches emerge in the production process), having been on the plantation so long his Master can't actually remember his arrival. But underneath, the décharge burns in him as well, and one day he too flees into the forest:
He turns around toward that Plantation where he has worn out his life; he looks at the distant buildings, the sugar-works chimney with its leaping flames, so familiar; he hears one last time the sound of the now-widowed machines. The shiver slips away at his nape. Then, the slave old man plunges into the tall trees. The ancient howl of the mastiff begins to undo the domain, provoking the eleventy-thousand strange little hitches already described, and faced with which the science of slavery gave way.
And there he, and the master and the mastiff in pursuit, plunges into the depths, allowing Chamoiseau and Coverdale to give full and lyrical voice to the descriptions of the Martinican scenery and the local folklore:
He had the impression of descending endlessly, of reaching even the fondoc-fundament of the earth. There he thought to find the vomiting of lava or the fires said to flame from the foufoune-pudenda of femmes-zombis. The torn rachées of his heart throbbed within him, stirring liquid, glowing embers that shattered his body to rejoin the sky. Such incandescence summoned up wild earthy fumes in his bones. Leaves, roots, trunks, took on the odor of ashes graced with those of green corn and newborn buds.
...
He expected to suddenly see the monsters feared by the folktales: the impish Ti-sapoti, the dog-head women, the fireball soucougnans, the flayed-flying-women perfumed with phosphorus, the unbaptized misery of coquemares, and the persecuted zombie persecutors.
...
The old man rediscovers a primordial darkness. Revealed by the blindfold, it is not comparable to the darkness at the beginning of his flight. This night neither envelopes the trees nor flows from the sky. He knows it is released inside him as he runs. He senses its growing épaissi, its thickeningness, like a patterning of the balan-rhythm of his running. It seems to allow him to exist a little closer to the center of his being. His skin is skimming up the promise of the coming sun. Infinite variations solicit his dermis: the earthy aura of the tall trees; the increasing keenness of a shaft of light; the oceanic armpit of a ravine; the mummified silence where ferns exhale the odor of eternal death and stubborn life. For the moment, he has no sensation of going up or down. Suspended within himself, he travels through a sensory topography that molds itself to his body.
...
These Great Woods that knew the Before, that harbored the communion host of an innocence gone by, and which still trembled with primal forces – these woods moved him now.
The labels attached to the Slave Old Man evolve as his journey does (e.g. to 'old man') and the text even switches from third to first person mid paragraph, remaining their for the rest of the novel, to symbolise his rediscovery of his own identity:
Light was strong but no longer as violent. It came from the outside, doubtless from the inside, shining upon him sweetly. The things around him were formless, moving, as if seen through very clear water. I opened my eyes wide to see better, and the world was born without any veil of modesty. A vegetal whole in an imperious evening dew. I … The leaves were many, green in infinite ways, as well as ochre, yellow, maroon, crinkled, dazzling, indulging themselves in sacred disorder.
And even the mastiff and the slave master have an epiphany of sorts, one that the author suggests may, at least, echo positively in future generations:
In him, now, other spaces were bestirring themselves, spaces where he would never go, perhaps, but where one day no doubt, in a future generation, hopefully in the full radiance of their purity and legitimate strength, his children would venture, as one confronts a first misgiving.
An impressive translation, not a straightforward read but a worthy BTBA winner.
Linda Coverdale's wonderful translation of Martinique author Patrick Chamoiseau's L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse was the winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award, under its US title Slave Old Man.
(for some reason the British title is The Old Slave and the Mastiff and the American one Slave Old Man - can't understand why neither could pick the obvious Slave Old Man and the Mastiff)
Now I have to admit that I struggled with my one previous Patrick Chamoiseau novel, his Prix Goncourt winning Texaco, translated by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov (see Garth Risk Hallberg's take here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/15/garth-risk-hallberg-texaco-patrick-chamoiseau-how-fiction-new). I could understand Milan Kundera's hailing of the novel as "Truly poetic ... the unbridled improvisation of a storyteller who is swept along by his own talking and who oversteps the frontier of the plausible when he wants to — joyfully, and with quite stunning ease," but can't say I really understood much of what I was reading.
Slave Old Man and the Mastiff (I'm going to use my own title) more satisfying, thanks to Linda Coverdale's wonderful job in not only translating the mixture of French and Creole into her own lyrical register, but providing an introductory note, afterword and a number of helpful footnotes (reading on a Kindle made referring to these a pleasure), which, combined, are half the length of the novel itself.
Coverdale explains in her introduction, how Creole was developed by Caribbean slaves both as a fusion of the Babel of their tribal and European langauges, but it also allowed plantation storytellers to say far more than 'their listening masters could ever understand', using the language, as Chamoiseau says in his Creole Folktales, in a way ‘that is opaque, devious – its significance broken up into a thousand sibylline fragments’, and she effectively incorporates the Creole into her text, often providing a word followed by its English translation (djok-strong), or adding a small additional gloss.
Each chapter (cadence in Chamoiseau's terminology) of the novel begins with a passage from works by [a:Édouard Glissant|5461517|Édouard Glissant|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1390996850p2/5461517.jpg], a foundation figure of Martinique and indeed Caribbean literature, putting Chamoiseau's novel in dialogue with his, as well as a poetic epigraph from an anonymous work Touch.
So the novel opens:
(from Glissant)
There is, before the cabin, an old man who knows nothing of ‘poetry’ and in whom the voice alone resists. Grizzled hair on his black head, he bears in the mêlée of lands, in the two histories, before-land and here-land, the pure and stubborn power of a root. He endures, he treads the fallow land that yields not. (His are the deeps, the possibilities of the voice!) I have seen his eyes, I have seen his wild lost eyes seeking the space of the world.
then:
Immobile dreams of bones
of what was, is no more,
and yet persists in the foundation of an awakening
Touch
folio I
and the novel proper:
In slavery times in the sugar isles, once there was an old black man, a vieux-nègre, without misbehaves or gros-saut orneriness or showy ways. He was a lover of silence, taster of solitude. A mineral of motionless patiences. Inexhaustible bamboo. He was said to be rugged like a land in the South or the bark of a more-than-millennial tree. Even so, Word gives us to understand that he blazed up abruptly in a beautiful bonfire of life.
the original French:
Du temps de l'esclavage dans les isles-à-sucre, il y eut un vieux-nègre sans histoires ni gros-saut, ni manières à spectacle. Il était amateur de silence, goûteur de solitude. C'était un minéral de patience immobile. Un inépuisable bambou. On le disait rugueux telle une terre du Sud ou comme l'écorce d'un arbre qui a passé mille ans. Pourtant, la Parole laisse entendre qu'il s'enflamma soudain d'un tel boucan de vie.
The novel is set on a Martinique sugar plantation and its group of slaves:
The Plantation is small, but each link among its memories vanishes into the ashes of time. The bite of the chains. The rwasch of the whip. The rending cries. Explosive deaths. Starvations. Murderous fatigues. Exiles. Deportations of different peoples forced to live together without the laws and moralities of the Old-world. All of that quickly muddles, for those gathered there, the rippling of recollections and the depth-sounding of dreams. In their flesh, their spirit, subsists only a calalou-gumbo of rotting remembrance and stagnant time, untouched by any clock.
Every month or so one of the younger slaves succumbs to a fevered desire to escape, and flees into the jungle, where they are pursued and inevitably caught by the Master and his huge and savage dog, the mastiff.
There was, as happened almost every month, a young nègre convinced he was wilier than his predecessors and who was hit out of the blue by la décharge. I am going to tell you about the décharge. The old slaves knew about this: it was a bad sort of impulsion vomited up from a forgotten spot, a fundamental fever, a blood clot, a désursaut pas-bon: a not-good jump-up, a shivering summons that jolted you raide off the tracks. You went around being taken to pieces by an impetuous inner presence. Your voice took on a different sound. Your gait grew gently grotesque. A religious flutter set your cheeks and eyelids trembling. And your eyes bore the customary fiery marks of awakened dragons.
The eponymous Slave Old Man is, to outside appearances, placid and content in his lot, the fixer who makes everything function smoothly (one he is gone many minor hitches emerge in the production process), having been on the plantation so long his Master can't actually remember his arrival. But underneath, the décharge burns in him as well, and one day he too flees into the forest:
He turns around toward that Plantation where he has worn out his life; he looks at the distant buildings, the sugar-works chimney with its leaping flames, so familiar; he hears one last time the sound of the now-widowed machines. The shiver slips away at his nape. Then, the slave old man plunges into the tall trees. The ancient howl of the mastiff begins to undo the domain, provoking the eleventy-thousand strange little hitches already described, and faced with which the science of slavery gave way.
And there he, and the master and the mastiff in pursuit, plunges into the depths, allowing Chamoiseau and Coverdale to give full and lyrical voice to the descriptions of the Martinican scenery and the local folklore:
He had the impression of descending endlessly, of reaching even the fondoc-fundament of the earth. There he thought to find the vomiting of lava or the fires said to flame from the foufoune-pudenda of femmes-zombis. The torn rachées of his heart throbbed within him, stirring liquid, glowing embers that shattered his body to rejoin the sky. Such incandescence summoned up wild earthy fumes in his bones. Leaves, roots, trunks, took on the odor of ashes graced with those of green corn and newborn buds.
...
He expected to suddenly see the monsters feared by the folktales: the impish Ti-sapoti, the dog-head women, the fireball soucougnans, the flayed-flying-women perfumed with phosphorus, the unbaptized misery of coquemares, and the persecuted zombie persecutors.
...
The old man rediscovers a primordial darkness. Revealed by the blindfold, it is not comparable to the darkness at the beginning of his flight. This night neither envelopes the trees nor flows from the sky. He knows it is released inside him as he runs. He senses its growing épaissi, its thickeningness, like a patterning of the balan-rhythm of his running. It seems to allow him to exist a little closer to the center of his being. His skin is skimming up the promise of the coming sun. Infinite variations solicit his dermis: the earthy aura of the tall trees; the increasing keenness of a shaft of light; the oceanic armpit of a ravine; the mummified silence where ferns exhale the odor of eternal death and stubborn life. For the moment, he has no sensation of going up or down. Suspended within himself, he travels through a sensory topography that molds itself to his body.
...
These Great Woods that knew the Before, that harbored the communion host of an innocence gone by, and which still trembled with primal forces – these woods moved him now.
The labels attached to the Slave Old Man evolve as his journey does (e.g. to 'old man') and the text even switches from third to first person mid paragraph, remaining their for the rest of the novel, to symbolise his rediscovery of his own identity:
Light was strong but no longer as violent. It came from the outside, doubtless from the inside, shining upon him sweetly. The things around him were formless, moving, as if seen through very clear water. I opened my eyes wide to see better, and the world was born without any veil of modesty. A vegetal whole in an imperious evening dew. I … The leaves were many, green in infinite ways, as well as ochre, yellow, maroon, crinkled, dazzling, indulging themselves in sacred disorder.
And even the mastiff and the slave master have an epiphany of sorts, one that the author suggests may, at least, echo positively in future generations:
In him, now, other spaces were bestirring themselves, spaces where he would never go, perhaps, but where one day no doubt, in a future generation, hopefully in the full radiance of their purity and legitimate strength, his children would venture, as one confronts a first misgiving.
An impressive translation, not a straightforward read but a worthy BTBA winner.
heatherlee's review
4.0
I think this is a 4 star book, but gosh... this was a struggle to follow, it lost me for big sections. I think if I was studying the text, really delving into it, I would have got more out of it. As a casual read, it's just too tricky for me.
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