When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Product Information

ha….for my benefit too …..I’d like to re- read these again in six months and see what I think then. In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis, NY: New York Review of Books, 2021. I thought the writing was lovely, sometimes archaic, sometimes very current. If I was this overwhelmed with a translation, I can't even imagine how stunning it is in Catalan which you can hear a snippet of here. The family undergoes another tragedy when, at the age of twenty, Hilari is shot dead by his best friend Jaume, ‘the Giants’ son, all shoulders, small, dark, round head.’ Jaume is also Mia’s lover, and the two of them share naked trysts deep in the forest. Although the shooting is an accident, under the Franco regime Jaume the Giants’ son is deemed a murderer, and goes to prison for five years (had he walked the other way down the mountain into France, he would have faced no such charges). He is so shattered with guilt and shame that he refuses Mia’s prison visits and cannot bring himself to face her on his release from jail, settling into life as an itinerant grill-house chef, a brawler and a drinker; a man on a short fuse. The tale spins on its axis, bringing in a cast of characters and creatures, and the ghosts of men and women who dwell in the forest, among them poor deceased Hilari himself, who now composes poems of solemn and irreverent beauty from beyond the grave. There are other dead roaming the forest too, such as little Palomita whose leg was blown off by a bomb in the civil war — an actual event that took place in January, 1939, when Italian war planes bombed the small town of Garriga, near Barcelona. In the homes around here memories of civil war are never as distant as the years that separate them might suggest, nor are the relics of that war, whether old grenades discovered in a field, or the memories of a son kidnapped by retreating Republicans, and executed ‘just in case’, or of a daughter whose throat is slit as a punishment for emptying a pot of boiling soup onto the heads of some Fascist recruits. The writing is gorgeous….tender, dense, lyrical, poetic, and violent…..with an assortment of styles…a medley of sorts.

Poem for Me, Hilari” is one of several verses composed by the young poet, who like his father before him, composes poetry as he tills the land, never bothering to write any of it down. Hilari is one of many voices telling the story from different points of view. As he explains: “Poetry has to be full like a nightingale. Like morning. Like the thin air at dusk on its way to France. Or not. Or wherever it wants to go. I don’t have anything to write on, anyway, and no pencil.” Given I’m serving time ‘healing’ a soleus calf muscle….on walking-punishment-time-out…I can sit around all day and read my little heart out…. Emotions are more naked up here too. More raw. More authentic. Life and death, life and death and instinct and violence are present in every single moment up here. The rest of us, we’ve forgotten how sublime life is. In the city we go through the motions with our watered-down lives. But here, here you really live each and every day. As soon as the weather turns, even if it’s just a gawky bit of early spring, I have this need to get up into the mountains, at least once a month. Leave it all behind and just spend a day in the fresh air. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes on my own. If I can ever buy a little house up here, an old farmhouse, a summer place, I’ll call it Can Gentil. But it would have to be a farmhouse, because I can’t see myself in a villa.El verdadero protagonista, pese a la multitud de narradores, sigue siendo el paisaje. La montaña, con su fauna y su flora. La propia naturaleza. El resto, es un mero instrumento para Irene. Herramientas que sirven para reflejar la ruralidad de un pueblecito de montaña como Camprodon y evocar todas esas vidas que algunos no sentimos tan lejanas. Quizá no similares, porque están inspiradas y ancladas en la región Pirenaica, pero si cercanas en sentimiento. El escenario sobre el que contar leyendas y tradiciones, historias de espíritus y de brujas. Pero también de personas. De muertes trágicas y familias destrozadas. De amores y desamores. De triunfos y derrotas. De oportunidades y condenas. Un relato que refleja eso de que el tiempo pasa, pero a veces no olvida. The mountains we’d been, the houses and the dens and the liars and the terraces and the crests we had been, shall cease to be. And our peaks will become valleys and plains, and our ruins, our remains, will become tons of rubble sinking into the sea, new mountains”. The narrative begins with the Lightening, which is both the chapter’s title and the narrator’s name: Sometimes a book comes along that enhances your way of being in the world: for two such books to fall into your hands, in serendipitous collusion, is a thing to marvel at, and perhaps even to write about. Whatever their differences, and they are legion, the two books under review, both written by young women — one a memoir by an anthropologist, the other a piece of fiction that reads like a fable — together provide a thorough dismantling of the notion of genre. But more importantly, both books open a window onto systems of belief in which humans and other animals, plants, fungi and diverse organisms survive and thrive in interconnected and interdependent ways, consciously or otherwise, reflecting an unexpected harmony at the heart of lived experience. Towards the end of When I Sing, we are swept up in the ineluctable sadness of all that cannot be undone and of an accompanying sense of release, as Mia asserts that being sorry for something and forgiving somebody might happen at the same time, might be two sides of the same coin, and one’s sorrow might co-exist with one’s love, however far that sorrow or that love has had to travel.

La centralidad está en la familia que integran Domenéc y Sió, y sus dos hijos, Mía e Hilari; aunque tal vez debiera decir que la centralidad está en la montaña misma, y en la naturaleza que la habita, y que junto a la magia que perdura en estos sitios donde la mano humana aún no ha dejado huella, determinan la ventura y desventura de las personas que la pueblan. Estar acompañada de Bon Iver mientras leía ha sido la guinda del pastel ¿Puede haber un grupo más evocador, melancólico y bonito? This is the route of the retreat into exile. Where the Republicans fled. Civilians and soldiers. Toward France. It’s a damp morning. I inhale, bringing all that clean, wet, pure mountain air deep into my lungs. That aroma of earth and tree and morning. It’s no surprise the people up here are better, more authentic, more human, breathing this air every day. And drinking the water from this river. And looking out every day at the majesty of these legendary mountains, so beautiful it pains the soul. They leave me standing in front of the bakery. There’s no note on the door. No obituary. Nothing. It’s a quarter after eleven. The butcher’s shop and the bakery are the only two stores in town. You can buy most anything at the butcher’s, milk and juice and even pasta and rice and wine. In the bakery there’s even more, it even has dish soap and scrubbers and mops. Un pequeño pueblo en el corazón del Pirineo, con sus gentes y con la intensidad propia de quien vive fundido con la naturaleza. Una montaña que observa impasible la vida y la muerte de quienes la habitan. La voz de los abuelos, los padres, los hijos, los animales, los fantasmas, el bosque, las nubes.. Muchas voces que narran parte, porque todos forman esta historia, todos están relacionados, todos atrapados en el ciclo de nacimiento-vida-muerte de una forma bella, mágica y trágica al mismo tiempo. ¿Y no es acaso eso la vida?The woman turns her head and doesn’t answer me. Her companion, who’s somewhat less of a witch, says, “Hilari from Matavaques is dead. He was killed by the Giants’ son, in the forest. They were hunting and they had an accident and Hilari is dead,” she says. “Hilari of Matavaques is dead. Like his father. Only twenty years old. So tragic.” La narración tiene las características de un canto poético, que recuerda por momentos el naturalismo del siglo XVIII-XIV, dándole voz a los vivos y muertos, a los animales, las plantas e incluso a la montaña misma: When I Sing, Mountains Dance may leave you baffled at first. So, again, approach it not as a novel but as a celebration of language and inventiveness. It’s not quite poetry, not quite narrative, but rather a mélange of the two; a distinctive set of voices and narratives that somehow merges into a whole. And as in all good but challenging literature, meaning eventually arises like the mist lifting on a fresh, dewy morn to reveal a hidden landscape of preternatural, previously unknown beauty. As Nastassja Martin, she is interrogated by a Russian FSB (secret services) agent, on the basis that she has spent most of her time in a militarised zone occupied only by Even hunters, who live in a state of almost complete self-sufficiency. She spends three hours with the agent, who is the first, but not the last person to intimate that to be an anthropologist is to be a spy. Her two families turn up; Nastassja’s birth family from France, and Nastinka’s adopted Even family from the forests of Kamchatka. The two groups of her loved ones look nothing like one another, speak different languages, and come from different worlds; the two worlds between which she is riven. One of the nurses looking after her tells her: ‘Nastya, you might almost say there are two different women occupying this room.’ An astute observation, but perhaps more accurately there are three of her, if you include the bear.