Aidan Higgins (1927–2015)

A weird, atmospheric tale of decay in an impoverished if "better class" household of three sisters (one hs already died.) in late 1930s Dublin
Living in gloom, cold and ruin- their parents dead, the house crumbling about them...and unexplained hostilities between them.- the story focusses mainly on 40-ish Imogen, and her doomed relationship with a seemingly useless German student, staying in one of their properties.
There's no great STORY as such, but it is poetic, atmospheric and quite memorable.… (más)

A gorgeously written novel in letters, between an Irish man and a Danish woman, in a modernist style out of Joyce or Woolf, with a really masterly sad and ambiguous ending. But there are roadblocks to appreciating the book's accomplishment, and they have to do with how Irishness and Danishness are imagined. Higgins inadvertently raises very interesting questions of translation and dialect.

1. The letters written by the Danish woman are full of infelicities. To a native English reader with no Danish, they can seem touching, awkward, and sometimes a bit opaque, and that is how I imagine Higgins imagined them. But how do they read to a native speaker of Danish? They do not remind me of errors I hear when I am in Denmark, listening to English being spoken. Do the choices of solecisms make this book effectively unreadable for Danish readers? Why didn't Higgins imagine he might have such readers?

2. And if the book were to be translated into Danish, what awkwardnesses would the translator invent? And if it were put into German, how would those awkwardnesses be distinguished from the couple's awkward 'love German'?

3. The main character's English is seldom distinctly Irish-English, as in Joyce and even Beckett. That seems to be a conscious decision, made in the name of internationalism, or just out of general fatigue with Irishness. But to a native English speaker who has spent time in Ireland (like me), or to an Irish person, the relative lack of Anglo-Irish inflections and slang is strange: apparently Higgins didn't mind alienating readers who might expect something more Irish in the Irish character, but why didn't he think that alienating Irish readers would be a distraction from his love story? Why didn't he realize that a novel that turns on infelicities of language is necessarily going to make readers sensitive to erasures of language?

4. Sometimes the characters write modernist punctuationless stream-of-consciousness prose, or modernist sentence fragments. And why would Higgins think this isn't distracting? I can't imagine him thinking that readers would conclude that free form modernist stream-of-consciousness prose is somehow a natural way of representing passion, as it was, once, for Joyce. The only alternative is that he is just not picturing modernist prose as an historical moment.

Higgins seems not to have thought about these things. His focus is on the beauty of his own writing and the love story. For me those are not quite enough to make up for his obliviousness about who, in the real world, might read his book.

Addendum, February 26, 2010: here are some thoughts contributed by a Danish correspondent of mine; what she says goes to point no. 1:

'Normally it would be easier to read English written by a Dane; it is easier to figure out what was ment. But that's not the case here. Sometimes I am not sure what the sentences mean, and I am not sure if it is because my English is not good enough, if it should be a stylistic touch, or as a 'Danish' mistake (if it is the latter it very often doesn't succeed). ('The unbath child'? p. 34)
It annoys me that there are so many relatively complicated sentences and varying words and still it is almost the same -s ending mistakes 'she' makes (like 'you was' p. 35 so many times) (typically a Dane would make many different endings, sometimes remembering the -s and other times putting it where it doesn't belong because we don't have any variation in the jeg er/I am, du er/you are, han/hun er/she/he is...). And when she writes that she doesn't use the dictionary anymore it seems weird that the kind or number of mistakes don't change at all. Her writings seem constructed like 'I was tempty to go down into the green valley' (p. 49). A Dane wouldn't write tempty - the ending in Danish would have been fristet /tempted (a more usual mistake would be temptet). Somewhere she spells 'skin' as 'skinn' and that wouldn't be the mistake of a Dane but a Norwegian. I can't find the quote again, but there is also a spelling mistake in a Danish sentence.
There are also a lot of typical Danish mistakes like writing 'His complexion is sickly and sunburned' (p.69) (Danes tend to have problems with or without -ly). But the overall feeling is that it is constructed with some kind of authentic material as the starting point.
The German words and sentences seem to me a bit corny (not a love language, but a making love language). I think a Dane would typically find German a bit funny or like a parody when it is used as a 'love language' (there are too many German porn movies here, maybe).
I had a feeling of not being the right reader for this book, because the language became an obstacle in an, I think, unintended way. I think he went so deeply into the construction of the text that he forgot or didn't find important to think of the Danish reception. All the mentioning of Denmark and Northern European places, products, names and even the style of writing made me feel like a part of an exotic tribe. I would have guessed the writer to be American if I didn't know his origin.'

I'm imagining Higgins would be mortified by that last observation.

Addendum, January 2016:

Following Higgins's death there have been several assessments of his work. In light of my notes here it's significant that he is taken to be an internationalist, as in this passage from a piece by Neil Murphy (The Irish Times, January 11, 2016):

"Higgins was a citizen of the world long before our current battalions of émigré writers and his works reflected this in ways that even Joyce’s did not. He repeatedly reminds us of the essentially cosmopolitan DNA that features so heavily in the Irish genetic-imaginative code and, more importantly perhaps, that the connection between our lives and the way we talk of them is an endlessly fascinating, mutable process."… (más)