Two novels titled Attila - Maximal words striving to breach an angel

I will write about two newly published translations of Spanish novels that comprise an amusing stunt by Open Letter Books.  They are Attila by Aliocha Coll (1991) and Attila by Javier Serena (2014), both translated by Katie Whittemore. 

Coll’s Attila is a Finnegans Wake-inspired semi-comprehensible dream novel about, at a surface level, the son of Attila the Hun who is a royal hostage of the Roman Empire, and how his loyalty is divided between Rome and the Huns.  Serena’s Attila is a “much more conventional work of fiction” (132) about an author named Alioscha Coll (note spelling) who lives in humiliating filth and poverty in Paris while devoting his life to his incomprehensible novel Attila.  A study of creativity, let’s say, a sad one since the fictional Coll, like the real one, kills himself just after completing his novel.

Whittemore had translated a later Serena novel and wanted to do this one, and succumbed to the publisher’s pressure to translate the Coll as well without knowing what she was getting into.  She fears “that I don’t really get it” (18) and suggests that she has botched the job, completing it only with the help of her medium.  “My own sanity rests on simply getting the book done” (18).  I have never seen a translator’s introduction like this.  I take it as fiction, mostly, another paratext like Serena’s novel, similarly, or more, insightful.  Serena also writes that he does not understand Coll’s book.

Attila (Coll) sometimes looks like this (144):

But mostly does not, and much of the difficulty of the novel is not with lines like the last ten on that page but the “wormless drupes” in the second line, “drupe” being a technical term from botany.  Even with a cognate in Spanish (“drupa”) it is the kind of word the translator has to look up, as did I.  Coll loves technical words from architecture, math, and various sciences.  Archaic words, too.

Comploring . . . not compluviating . . . the lamenting of those two lovers . . . the . . . roof of their heartbreak removed. (106, all those dots in the original)

The pairing of two similar sounding but otherwise unrelated words is like Finnegans Wake (“complore” is on p. 557 of Wake for what that is worth).  What is utterly unlike Joyce’s novel is the explanation, immediately following, of how Coll imaginatively connects the words.  To “complore” is to weep together, “compluviate” is a style of ancient Roman roof, and if the “roof of their heartbreak” is not exactly a natural metaphor it is immediately comprehensible.

“. . . You won’t find it . . . there are as many missing words as excess ones, and all the words you know are excess . . .” (105, ellipses in original)

A long chunk of Attila, Chapter III, a full quarter of the novel, is even straightforward, establishing characters, settings, a plot, and the usual novelistic stuff.  The protagonist, Attila’s son, is named Quixote, and he soon sets on a hallucinatory dream journey with caves and deserts and a kind of dialectical chorus that includes the Queen of Sheba and Laocöon.  Much of the action is dialectical.  There is a lot of argument.  But the author took his penname from the dialectical Dostoevsky, from Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, so what did I expect.  Characters double and redouble in the cave and the desert, allowing more argument.

Thalia replied with clusters of bunched words, whose only axis seemed to be that smile which did not leave her mouth while she spoke but, on the contrary, continued to unfurl. (116)

Why am I trying to summarize the novel when Andrei the Untranslated did such a good job, and he read it in Spanish.  I will just point to what I think is the novel’s essence:

“Don’t be content with what Attila tells you, for you still confuse inexpression and lack of communication, your senses are like dried beans in the roomy pod of your consciousness, tiny clappers of an immense bell, irreclaimable symbols in the allegory, lost identities in the imperceptible aura.”  (233)

To be clear, inexpression is bad but lack of communication is not, is perhaps even good.  “One must always write as if one could not write” (178).  Coll looks to me as if he is one of those writers who is trying to look behind the veil, to break out of Plato’s cave.  He thinks it can be done by manipulating words.  “Maximal words striving to breach an angel” (203).  I do not think it can, but many of my favorite writers have tried, and I hope many keep trying.

Serena insists his Coll is fictional, which I believe, although as a consequence I kept wondering about other possible versions of Coll, aside from the difficult anti-social sex pest Serena portrays, especially since Serena has so little insight into Coll’s novel.  I did recognize one insight, a real Spanish one:

But at least it would be a worthy death, he said, as if Alioscha were fighting against some vague dictator, torch in hand. (53)

Even an apolitical, self-exiled Spanish writer in the late 1980s had at least absorbed the metaphor of art as resistance to fascism:

“He was the same with writing as he might have been with a pair of combat boots and a machine gun in the jungle.” (52)

There is an interesting part of Serena’s Attila where Coll gets a Spanish publisher interested in a translation, which everyone thinks is brilliant, of an English play.  There is some joke here I do not understand:

… he also included a few pages of a translation he had done of Henry VIII by Christopher Marlowe, whom he claimed to feel much closer to than any other novelist of his age. (71)

If someone could explain the joke – why this play, this playwright, this misattribution – I would appreciate it.

I recommend Serena’s Attila to readers who like short, easy books about difficult writers and Coll’s Attila to readers who like to look up words (Whittemore already did the hard work).