MANAS – full translation
Introducing Döblin’s most neglected epic fiction
I posted earlier my adaptation of Döblin’s Himalayan verse epic as a Play for Voices; here’s the link to the download:
MANAS – a Play for Voices by C D Godwin (PDF download 2.3 MB)
I’m now making available here for download my complete translation of Manas. To help orient the reader, I provide my Introduction, followed by three contemporary reviews (1927-28) – two mostly positive, one decidedly negative.
MANAS complete – rev Jan 2019.
Since Manas will be published as a book / ebook in spring 2020, this download has been deactivated.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
© C. D. Godwin 2019
This remarkable book – an exciting and intriguing story, told with great verve in a vigorous, direct language of many moods and voices – is the least known of the major fictions Alfred Döblin produced over the forty tumultuous years pre-World War 1 to post-World War 2. Döblin himself (apart from one title) is the least known of the 20th century’s great German writers, though his reputation has grown in Germany since his death in 1957: smart new editions appear every decade or so, and streams of books, journal articles and scholarly colloquia examine aspects of his art and his thinking.
The Anglophone reader comes to Döblin with little idea what to expect. Maybe a vague knowledge of that one title from his vast output: Berlin Alexanderplatz – The Story of Franz Biberkopf. The next novel after Manas, it has eclipsed all the rest ever since its publication in 1929.
And with Manas you truly are entering virgin territory. Virtually nothing has been written about it in English, and this is the first English translation (maybe the first into any language). Even in Germany Manas suffers unjustified neglect, which is a puzzle, given that Döblin declared bluntly that Biberkopf is Manas auf berlinisch – ‘Manas with a Berlin accent’.
This leaves me with the delicate task of encouraging you to read a work that’s been totally ignored by the literati.
Well, you say, can’t be much good then. Not so, I urge: take the taste test! Sample some of the Notable Passages I’ve highlighted. Savour the language, the sounds, the moods and voices. (This is a text for the ears, not just the eyes.)
Blank verse! you say. That’s a hurdle, for a start. Not so, I promise. There’s nothing complicated or ‘hard’ about the crisp, powerfully dramatic format Döblin chose for Manas. (Nothing here of the chaotic noisy word-montage of the Berlin novel!) Overcome your fear of ‘poetry’! Find delight in the vigour, the vivid scenes, the voices human, divine, demonic, the constantly surprising actions and mood-shifts. As the story drives ahead, you’ll keep wondering: whatever next?
As I translated Manas I imagined it as a graphic novel, a stage play, a film – Bollywood, even! Once I’d finished, I adapted it as a radio play, incorporating about a third of the text along with a synopsis and other navigation aids. At www.beyond-alexanderplatz.com you can download Manas – a Play for Voices for free. (If you belong to an AmDram group, why not encourage a group reading?)
A word about the ‘epic’
Döblin’s reputation rests largely on the major fictions he called ‘epics’. Manas was the fourth. He wanted a new kind of fiction, a break from the bourgeois novel: no more playing with ‘plot’, ‘suspense’, ‘individuals’ with invented ‘psychologies’, no more cheap eroticism.
Instead Döblin sought to reinvigorate, under the difficult conditions of the modern age, that art with which Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, for example, enthralled large audiences over long spans of time. These authors, he declared, dealt with themes of universal enduring human concern: life and death, good and evil, power and subjection, fate, meaning; humans acting in and on the world, either in Nature or in defiance of Nature (hubris, nemesis). A daunting task, he knew. The minstrel entertaining with a tale of Troy received immediate feedback: the audience, in a sense, was co-creator. Now the writer in his study produces a book: it may or may not be ‘noticed’ – often the critic will be ignorant and/or prejudiced; and little feedback from readers will make its way to the writer, who by then has anyway moved on to the next project.
Still, Döblin persevered. His epic fictions cover an astonishing range in space and time – 18th century China; Europe in the Thirty Years War; a hyper-Promethean 27th century; mythical India; Weimar Berlin; modern Europe through the eyes of a Babylonian god; South America pre-Conquest to the present day; the failed German revolution of 1918.
Döblin’s fictions – all substantial works: Wallenstein, the Amazonas trilogy, November 1918 are each three to four times longer than Manas – are best conceived, he said, as symphonies. They proceed not so much by plot-action (though Manas does have a very forward-moving plot) as by themes and motifs that swell and fade, appear and reappear in tempi slow or fast, employing an orchestra of voices. And these symphonic fictions in their varied guises do indeed pursue, over forty years, matters of enduring human concern.
The earlier Döblin epics had no clear individual ‘hero’. They depicted masses: humans in collective settings (a sect, an army, a townzone), and the massive forces that bear down on them (oppression, war, economics). Manas is the first of Döblin’s major works in which his enduring and universal concerns are individualised – in Savitri, in Manas the proto-Biberkopf.
To say more would risk manipulating the reader’s own reception of this unique work, praised highly by Robert Musil and others when first published, and since ignored. Each reader will, I hope, enjoy something of the same sensation which, in Keats’ poem, stunned stout Cortes: ‘silent, upon a peak in Darien’.
Cortes, of course, quickly spread word of his discovery. May you do likewise!
Chris Godwin
THREE CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS OF MANAS (1927-28)
(1) By Axel Eggebrecht in Die Literarische Welt 3/24 (1927)
Sixteen months ago I published here some remarks about a conversation with Alfred Döblin on the topic of his coming epic Manas. Now I read that report again, and am struck by the exactness and acuity with which the writer spoke then of the work he had just embarked on, and outlined for me the course of the plot. This seemingly trite observation is interesting and important enough in the case of a work that decides to take place entirely in the region of the soul, among spirits and demons, hence in a realm of free fantasy where whim and unintentionality seem to have such limitless space. The total clarity with which Döblin sasw his way ahead from the start seems to me worth mentioning.
This great work can all too easily, in our completely pragmatic age concerned only with mundane problems, fall into the danger of being written off as a mere play of the imagination, as “useless” metaphysical caprice. Diebold’s description of Georg Kaiser as a “brain-gamer” seems to apply with greater justification to Alfred Döblin’s giant cerebral romanticism.
This book does not make it easy on the reader. The flowing river of his hymnlike language quickly wearies any chance visitor before they can come to realise where they have actually landed up. But even those who penetrate can easily become lost in the unreal, boundless, uncontrolled world of spirits and demons created by the writer, until it becomes too much.
This book unites the elements of poetry in a very bygone romantic-fantastical sense with the insights and demands of very “modern” and future writing: clarity, responsibility and alliance with the beliefs of the active life. The story of the battles of the superman Manas when he penetrates the realm of the dead, is beaten, is reborn, and is finally victorious over Shiva, is in the end nothing but the hymn of the cosmic anarchist Döblin to the magnificent independence and unbounded autonomy of the human spirit. Traditional myth is exploded to create the new myth of our unmythical time. It is the most radical representation imaginable of the victory of the conscious human soul over the unconscious soul of Nature. One of Döblin’s recent essays is titled “Great Nature and greater Human”. This is what Manas sets out to demonstrate.
Again we stand astonished, as with Mountains Oceans Giants, at the inexhaustible power and breadth of this brain. Even more moving are the inward sweetness of the most tender trifles, diversions into fairy tales, dreamily sure views of landscapes and souls with which this immense colourful hefty web of absolute phantasy is shot through. In it there are little sagas, Indian, maybe retold but in the retelling wonderfully renewed; amid this opulence of a conscious phantasizing intelligence are sections full of unparalleled surrender to landscapes, deserts, mountains and seas. And it ends in such jubilant wild triumph over the narrow sense-bound world that even the sober reader is pulled along and at last understands that he could not arrive here except by way of unbodied space, of an untrodden never to be trodden Beyond, of the autonomous world of fantasy far from all purposes and all causal and material laws.
It is, together with Döblin’s Giants book, perhaps the biggest triumph of our – precisely our – boundless spirit over its imprisonment in time and physicality. It is the ultimate and most exhilarating victory of a writer who could only have emerged in our time.
(2) By Robert Musil, in the Berliner Tageblatt (evening edition), 10 June 1927
In the midst of victory an Indian prince and army commander, depicted as a legendary hero, is lamed by a slight stroke at the sight of death and sorrow. All desires become fixed on one murky need: to visit the realm of the dead, from which no mortal can escape. The bitter taste of melancholy is fixed on his tongue. He persuades his tutor Puto, coercer of demons and one of the powers on Shiva’s mountain, to take him there. The Field of the Dead lies on the Himalayan slopes at the feet of the gods. There the souls of the departed lead a dreadful helpless existence and are chased like snowflakes by demons. As Manas becomes overwhelmed by this experience, he and his tutor are deceived by demons. Manas dies and stays behind in the horrors of death. But Savitri, his favourite wife, instead of letting herself be burned on the pyre, sets out to search for him. Her adventures fill the second part of the epic. At last she gives her beloved back his life, but goes herself to the gods, for she is divine, and has only been wandering from Shiva’s mountain. A part of her power remains with Manas through the mysterious union of love. Born again, he is himself half-divine; companion of demons, swollen with life, victor over horrors and death, he hurtles back into the soft vapidity of existence, arrogantly sweeps aside whatever he meets, and defeats gods. He is now in a state of heightened activity, such as we normally see only in madhouses: boundaries, the highest peaks of active will, suspended vertically over the abyss of absurdity. But in the end he is again overcome, this time not by sorrow or cunning or any other experience from the ranks of those that demean our feelings, but by Shiva himself, the Flower-footed World-shaker, the Blue-throated Archer and Dancer. Somehow: not defeated, but overcome; I leave aside whatever that may mean, for the intellect and its explanatory possibilities seem to me not what is meaningful in this book; which is rather the force that drives ahead torn free of all inhibition, the great surge of the underlying sense of our existence between manic excess and depression that streams through it, pulling along a relentless cornucopia of experiences.
With such a work you have to ask first: what is it trying to do? I’ll explain the problem in a few words. We are on good grounds in believing that the Epic as a specific art form is today in the last stages of withering. The imitation mediaeval verse narratives that before the age of realism amused the German drawing-room marked the lowest point, and if since then important writers, not born to verse-making, have nevertheless written what in a certain internal configuration were epics, this was recognised as a clear exception. Either a playful complacence was expressing itself by adopting an archaising format, in the same way that an endlessly long cigar is lit in order to slow the tempo of thought into dreaming. Or it was the expression of a Romantic unease, in which the word of the writer cannot lie far enough from the words of the world, which to some high priests of pure literary creation appear irredeemably profane.
The trend has long since transferred to the novel, and if you stick to the great examples, leaving aside the products of the publishing industry, there you see a development that is not only removed from the Epic, but from the epical, meaning the elements common to the past to which the novel owes gratitude for its acceptance as a kind of civilian version of epic poetry. For in the novel the only epical elements in the true or old sense of the word are its breadth, its capacity to paint, to linger, to spin threads, and that (hard to describe) “readerliness in itself” that can, by its curious deadening, dimming, constricting and diverting, temporarily lure the reader to abandon all mental capacities that distinguish him in life to follow breathlessly what may be an utterly stupid story. A paradox: today many more bad novels than good ones are literally epic writing. Intelligence, comprehensiveness, flexibility, speed, the capacity to form big pictures without abandoning the hard light of reality, in a word, the Real, the greater and more relevant mental aptness for our time that distinguishes the novel from other forms of writing, in this sense are un-epical. At the least, as those in the business are aware, the novel today has already been brought to an inner crisis; but even the public react to it by their more or less admitted distaste for long fat stories, claiming that modern life does not provide the time; by their distaste for the thin substance of the imagined life, which they compare with thronged reality; and against the naïve self-satisfaction of narrators who set themselves down comfortably like nannies while the children have long since lost the patience and credulity of their grandparents. I don’t in the least claim that all these phenomena of rejection have found the right formula, but they provide evidence that the epic has today become extremely problematic.
And the mythological no less so. In gardens the little statues put there by our grand-parents still stand with sword and bow, but they strike us as odd, like abandoned toys. Thanks to research, our age knows the myths much better than they were known earlier, but it treats them as pretty prehistorical shards that belong in a museum. No thought given that, from these countless remains of human dreaming overwhelmed and shattered by the awakening of Thought, perhaps a new whole might be made, that something new might be set in train. Particular myths may point to intriguing memories, but overall we seem to believe that they belong to a stage of consciousness long left behind.
Nothing is so indicative of the state of our consciousness as the split of its predilections between music and prose; while poetry concentrates on becoming ever more prose-like and uses the old magical means only in the pill-form of the lyric, the need for magic, rapture, great phrases and religious motivations has built itself up into the cloud-castle of music.
This spiritual double existence that we lead, between an un-lyrical and a too-lyrical state no longer bound to the truth of reality, is one of the reasons why art today seems so artificial and life so mechanical, and so neither is felt to relate to the full human soul. But if this is our state, then perhaps the need for myth is over, but certainly not for the epic – in the lost sense of the raising of life into the singable – rather it has merely been shunted aside, or neglected, and in short not many questions are as important for literature as this: how can one restore to it the intoxication, the gods, the verse, the larger-than-life without a plaster monumentality and without artificially darkening the brightness our spirit has achieved. In a word, the novel has so fundamentally subdued the epic that at the peak of its development already a need can be discerned for a counter-movement – which is not at all the same as a reversal.
And so it is neither caprice nor chance, but extraordinarily revealing of Döblin’s nervous intensity, that he is the first to ride this counter-movement, and with no caveats. There are probably other means of staying closer to today’s narrative forms, but it is the boldest move, and one requiring the most radical commitment, to simply go back to earlier verse narratives in order to make that ancient holy turtle move at today’s pace. You can’t say he gets away with it lightly – pious preservers and aficionados of the strict heavenly forms will cover their heads in horror – but it happens with a marvellous relentlessness that has great pulling power in even the smallest details.
The lines of this verse-novel are better seen as rhythmically broken images. “Jag Newas the island. – The Maharajah’s palace. – Pillared halls, domes, galleries. – The old king was not asleep. – He sat beneath a tamarind. From across the pool the water-ouzel sang.” If you study this quite simple example, you see that it is neither free rhythm nor rhythmic prose, but quite ordinary prose that apart from punctuation uses line breaks as the organising means, and in such a way that each line grasps and separates the image or group of related images in a shorter or longer breath-unit. This phrasing is layered over the weaker one of punctuation; this of course is true of every other kind of verse, but there it is more or less bound into a scheme, whereas here the intellectual inhibition and restraint that always makes itself felt in any long piece of writing falls completely away, and the expression follows only the dictates of spiritual and imaginative needs. Such verse can descend to the level of the diary entry, where notes are juxtaposed without syntax; but it can also rise dramatically in the most natural way to give a language of sobs, of agitation, of children, and at its highest a quite manically elevated language. I’ll quote an example that expresses several levels:
And Manas, helmet flung from him, chain-mail on the floor:
‘How long must I stand,
How long must I stand at the window,
How long must I stand here at this window,
How long must I stand at this pale hateful window of glass,
And I have to listen to you,
Listen hour upon hour upon hour…’
‘Manas, our joy! For two days we shall stay
And sing out to you.’
‘…Listen as you try to befuddle me, enchant me,
You shall enchant me no more.’
Here one sees other means of heightening. The most obvious – in a sense encompassing all the others – is varied repetition. Assonances and alliteration like “ripplerustlerush”, “cooing tugtwitch”, or “tumbled in dreadful clouds, whirled in tumbling clouds” – are interspersed with direct repetitions that increase the psychological weight, like “You shall feel your blood and blood” or “no way and nohow, and never and at no point”; sometimes the narrative is full of “ands”, and through this slowing down attains the tempo of a chain dragged across ground.
Sometimes four mountains to be climbed are expressed by naming four mountains one behind the other, unprocessed, exactly as they stand there in reality for the despairing eye. Sometimes these repetitions have the obstinacy of an unshakeable idea; sometimes whole sections reappear, always cut in a different way as in a film or a musical Leitmotif. Sometimes the same line appears in the most different settings, unexpected, wayward, so that it no longer seems like a work of European art, but the song of a madman drumming words onto his skull, or the religious rapture of a cannibal. This is not always in the best of taste, but such abused and dragged-along language is closer to the inner proceedings than a beautifully powdered skin. Even the many onomatopoeic expressions that are used are not always tasteful; this direct painting-with-sounds is in its weaker moments somewhat like that of a very lively adult telling children an exciting story (pelle pelle, sighsough, ei-eiah, girre girre, etc.) But in the stronger places it just like when, in a state of great urgency, our thoughts become illusions and words take on bodies. Hallucinations are not tasteful, but they are states of extreme intensity!
And here, I believe, we may recall that the mysterious correspondence between sound-picture and designated object belongs to the primal magic of speech, just as the influence of the breath-cycle and the mystery of varied repetition belong to rhythm and rhyme. For, as an aside, we attend too much to assonance and balance here; its effect rests just as much on the dissimilar, the only roughly corresponding, on the un-identical but merely analogous acoustic repetition in remarkable accordance with its context. The content of the analogy, the comparison, the identification of only partly similar images are the principal tools of pictorial, poetical thought, in contrast to the exact thought of Knowledge. In our good verse all of that has already eroded away, but what Döblin writes is a kind of primal verse, raw and passionate, with a quite unstable constant mixing and unmixing, again as if for the first time conjured up from the framework of prose. This achievement is as bold as it is successful, as extraordinary as it is surprising.
And there lies the problem of this book, and for those who don’t let themselves to be convinced, the problematic. All the rest will hardly find any resistance. The realism with which humans, super- and sub-humans, gods, the dead, demons, real and unreal events are described is as exact as an observation and as cruel as the fact that all flesh carries within it the ribs of death. Against and over one another these pitiless descriptions, the lyrical beauty of which are Döblin’s surprise, pile up to a wildly decorated tower. The events, sometimes designed for the youthful yearning for adventure, are even in such places as if a giant is rummaging in a child’s box of building bricks. In other places, thanks to Döblin’s extraordinary felicity in feeling his way into alien fantastical cultural milieus, they become great pictures and stylisations. In not a few places they become mighty mythically unfettered depictions, such as in the more peaceful light of a novel and its closer ties to the present would not be at all possible. In such parts the book enriches our literature in respect not of some detail, but of an entire region.
I shall point to just one example to illustrate this: the descriptions of the god Shiva. It is hard to depict a god, especially one with a big belly, plump cheeks, fat-smeared face, snakes in the hair, three eyes, four arms and so on, so that our missionaries call him a disgusting idol. Nevertheless he – the Blue-throated, the Flower-footed – is the World-shaker through love; around him wafts warmth, mountains bulge under him like soft pelts, snowfields melt when he steps on them, and Döblin succeeds in making of this paradoxically mixed god-being an actual god, one of whom his entourage speaks with sweetness, “him for whose sake one lives”.
I don’t know what influence this book will attain or whether the resistance it will certainly not be spared can be overcome. So I prefer not to trumpet out that here something has been created that should have great influence on the development of our literature. But even when I think it over coolly, I am confident in declaring that this work should have the greatest influence!
(3) By Wolfgang von Einsiedel in Die schöne Literatur 29 (1928)
What fascinates about Döblin again and again and to some extent demands our respect is his fantastical urge for the outsized and the obsessiveness of his cerebral imagination – which at first glance lends this work too the sense of the unusual. Nevertheless it is precisely here that Döblin, aiming for the highest and seeking to expand from the realm of the elemental into the spiritual, reveals more clearly than in most other works the poverty of his actual creative powers. At one point in the book he pronounces his own verdict: “Believe me, music is true.” In this sense Manas is not true insofar as it is not music but rather its opposite. Of course not in the sense that he fails to let the reader glide along on the riskless waves of a calm and peaceful river of verse; rather that he does not allow us to detect that mysterious streaming power that lifts up and overwhelms, and whose purest and most direct expression is music. In the jolting jerking twitching sentences of his language lies exposed the essence of Döblin’s artistry: it is cramp and hysteria, always needing to be forced. I hear a curiously thin voice that would like to scream but does not have the breath. And which therefore strives to lift itself supported by the noise of deafening instruments.
It would no doubt be worthwhile to analyse Döblin’s style of composition. In so doing you would find how artificial are the means by which he must create his atmosphere; how transparent for example is the suggestive intent with which exotic names are deployed. Then you finally get to the bottom of how the whole enormous mythological apparatus of gods and demons had to be summoned up in order to disguise the emotional and spiritual emptiness of the book. Hardly a place that really moves us. Everything remains external. It is often asserted that the characters are suffering. We do not suffer with them, remain cold and uninvolved and at last grow tired of the monotonous flickering.
Döblin seems to me at his truest and most characteristic in the bizarre and fantastical scenes with the three demons. We may find here and there steps towards greatness in vision and ideas – they choke in the harsh whirling desert of external incidents. Manas is no epic poem in a new form, but a magical feature film for intellectuals. Any deeper meaning is a mirage.
