{"id":412562,"date":"2019-01-18T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T17:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=412562"},"modified":"2019-01-18T14:53:28","modified_gmt":"2019-01-18T19:53:28","slug":"tell-them-of-battles-kings-elephants-by-mathias-enard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/01\/18\/tell-them-of-battles-kings-elephants-by-mathias-enard\/","title":{"rendered":"“Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants” by Mathias \u00c9nard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants
\n<\/em>Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell
\n<\/em>144 pgs. | pb |9780811227049 | $19.95
\n<\/em>New Directions Publishing<\/a>
\nReviewed by Grant Barber<\/p>\n

\n
<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

\u00c9nard is a Very Important Author indeed. He belongs on the stage with Pamuk, T Morrison, Morante, Okri, Delillo, J. Mar\u00edas, Vargas Llosa, D. Ugresic, Murakami, and Lianke. Yes, there are others. Some younger writers too rising in relevance, audience, voices in need of hearing, such as Teju Cole, Laila Lalami, Valerie Luiselli, Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n, and Han Kang. They and many others tell stories well, but also address the worlds they inhabit, engage in ideas, non-simplistic ethics, and emotions. They help us to better understand our world, ourselves, our histories common and divergent, and some help us understand people who are other than ourselves.<\/p>\n

But \u00c9nard is in a striking way a person for his times. He writes in his native French and has lived in Barcelona for 15 years. Previously, he intentionally sought out an education in Arabic and Persian, and has lived for extended periods in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. He probably has equals\u2014more likely immigrants who have come those places to Europe and the Americas\u2014but I bet no one can surpass his bona fides as a writer on the range of subjects\u2014\u201cthe zone,\u201d with which he deals.<\/p>\n

This historical novel imagines Michelangelo leaving the frustrations of royal and papal patronage that only sometimes comes with the needed funds to eat and make art. He slips away to Constantinople to take up the Sultan\u2019s commission of designing a bridge across the Golden Horn, physically uniting the European and Asian sides of that city. Di Vinci, the older rival of Michelangelo, had actually attempted the same project\u2014in verifiable historical record\u2014but it was never built. \u00c9nard suggests that the Sultan found the design inelegant, although historians of architecture have said it was unbuildable (until it actually was built according to di Vinci\u2019s plans though somewhere in Scandinavia, about 20 years ago).<\/p>\n

The novel succeeds on its own merits as a good story, well told. Michelangelo takes on believable flesh and blood, interacts with his guide\u2014an actual poet of that time and place who in the novel falls in love with Michelangelo. While the landlord of his living space is not as well realized, we are introduced to a merchant who trades between Venice and Constantinople, with profitability as his guide for allegiances. An androgynous muse, a voice in the night, comes to Michelangelo\u2019s bed after earlier dancing and serving food and tea. This woman\u2014the sex of the person not revealed to Michelangelo or reader until at least half-way through\u2014brings reflection, perspective, and speaks the same words as the title.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Some years ago I stood in line at a bookstore in DC. Behind me a woman explained to her father at great length how the book she was buying for him, Dan Brown\u2019s Di Vinci Code<\/em>, was so . . . everything. I couldn\u2019t hold back after a while, and turned and said something about the book actually being a novel, fiction. She sniffed in response and replied that she believed in it, all of it. Tom Hanks then starred in the documentary.<\/p>\n

A curious critical echo of that Brown follower attaches to this book. I\u2019ve been reading other notices and reviews of this \u00c9nard title. It made quite a few year-end lists for 2018. Other titles of his have been reviewed. I\u2019m sure the significant number of said reviews has nothing to do with it being short, and in the U.S. a hardcover with great cover art was released just before Christmas. And it\u2019s about Michelangelo . . . we like him. We like things with him in them. Like Irving Stone\u2019s The Agony and the Ecstasy<\/em> (movie starring Ben-Hur Moses Charlton Heston), the David, a pieta sculpture which was vandalized by a hammer wielding unstable man. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing though: Michelangelo didn\u2019t actually go to Constantinople, although the invitation was actually proffered by the Sultan in real life, with the enticement of a big pay off. Michelangelo was miffed with the pope, who had asked for a grand funeral monument but had provided little funds; the artist went to Florence instead in a sulk until papal emissaries brought him back to Rome and the pope finally granted an audience and money.<\/p>\n

\u00c9nard even has a postscript where he lays out the \u201cwell, it could<\/em> have happened this way.\u201d To the author\u2019s credit, he has told a tale compelling enough for some critics\u2014not many, but at least three I\u2019ve found\u2014who buy it, that the artist truly made this journey. The matter is not trivial though, based in \u00c9nard\u2019s larger project. These critics make the claim that Michelangelo\u2019s trip to Constantinople then shaped his imagination, introduced a bit of Oriental spin and flavor to his art that followed, without actually pointing to specific works. Because they can\u2019t. Because he didn\u2019t. \u00c9nard is a thoughtful critic of just such Orientalism, the romanticizing of the East. His life and his work from the European side of matters are uniquely situated to reflect on some of the most consequential issues and events we are living through.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Of those authors named at the beginning of this post, some have a distinctive style\u2014Mar\u00edas\u2019s long and descriptive sentences, which slow the pace of reading; Murakami\u2019s surreal universe. \u00c9nard, though, seems closer to early Delillo: the scifi Ratner\u2019s Star<\/em>, the urban detective story Great Jones Street, <\/em>a football novel, a philosophical one which looks at language (The Names<\/em>, still my favorite of his). Each of \u00c9nard\u2019s books address the zone of time and space and ideas of Western European culture and those of the Arabian peninsula, North Africa, the Balkans. However, each does so in with both a focus and variation in style.<\/p>\n

The title Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants <\/em>tips the author\u2019s hand: a quote from Rudyard Kipling, written about the Raj, the colonized India of his day, stories of wars, exotic royalty, wonderous beasts. \u00c9nard\u2019s title, and the same phrasing late in the novel, should put the reader on high alert. In case we\u2019d miss the source, it is also the epigraph of the novel attributed to Kipling.<\/p>\n

Four of \u00c9nard\u2019s nine books are in translation in English. Zone<\/em>, Compass<\/em>, Street of Thieves<\/em>, and now, this present book. Each have different settings, eras portrayed. An aged musician takes stock of his life and love in Compass<\/em>. Franz is an Austrian who has specialized in looking at how music, East and West, have influenced, interpenetrated the cultures of one another; Sarah, his romantic fixation is a historian about the same matters beyond music. In Street of Thieves<\/em>, a young man and his best friend live in our post 9\/11 world, with the Arab spring reaching the streets of Tangier, Morocco where they both live. They take divergent paths in, one radicalized, the other rootless as he travels and witnesses contemporary events in Morocco, Tunisia, and Spain.<\/p>\n

Zone <\/em>is remarkable for being one, long sentence, albeit with chapter breaks. The protagonist has missed his flight from Amsterdam to the Vatican, so he is on a train with briefcase full of documents, photos, and accounts of some of the late twentieth century\u2019s worst atrocities, bad actors, and his role as actor\/witness, specifically in Bosnia\/Serbia\/Croatia. The former Yugoslavia becomes a microcosm for contemporary fault lines between peoples\u2019 faiths and historical memories that never become left in the past.<\/p>\n

However \u201cthe zone\u201d is also a concept that \u00c9nard uses to point toward the Mediterranean region of countries, and those immediately contiguous. Some of what \u00c9nard points toward is the Orientalism of Edward Said\u2019s critique several decades on now. \u00c9nard in an interview has expressed some ambivalence about Said, saying that Said raised up the concept of Orientalism\u2014the mother of all cultural appropriations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries\u2014but in so doing actually perpetuated it.<\/p>\n

Instead, \u00c9nard claims that all of Europe is the Orient: the interpenetrations of cultures through invasions north and south, European, Asian, North African, Arabian throughout history have also opened the way for intellectual exchange. Also come the facile cultural adaptations. Disney\u2019s Aladdin\u2014the mystic, aromatic, cue the minor-key and unmistakable horns, land of genies, 1001 stories, Sinbad, and so forth. The Victorians had their own versions, probably no less kitschy and superficial, but with a big dose of colonialism. Rumi is a go-to poet for some time now at weddings that tilt toward the secular. He warrants almost a whole shelf alone in the poetry section of bookstores, kind of astonishing for a thirteenth century poet from Afghanistan writing about a break-away version of Islam.<\/p>\n

In the world of Tell Them<\/em>, the bridge is never built. Michelangelo was only charged with the design, not the construction of this fictional bridge. In \u00c9nard\u2019s postscript, he combines fact, the \u201cit-could-have-happened,\u201d with a report of the completion of the first steps of the bridge construction, only for it to be washed away by torrential rain and floods, and overshadowed by the Sultan\u2019s preoccupation with other, more pressing matters. This failed bridge can stand for some of the surrounding tensions, miscommunications, and worse: the European side of the city, now Istanbul, is where the Blue Mosque, the Ottoman palace, and the Hagia Sophia are. On the Asian side is the Galata Tower built by late medieval Genoese of Italy, and the side to which Michelangelo travels in the novel to attend Mass. Europe and Asia, east and west, linked but not, inhabiting one another\u2019s worlds.<\/p>\n

As stand-alones, \u00c9nard\u2019s books are interesting and engaging. Intellectually they engage us as an oeuvre\u2014at least for those of us who rely on translations\u2014as they mutually inform one another as part of a grand project. Gone though are the days when singular voices could claim the authority of the last word on a matter. Marx and Keynes cast large shadows over contemporary economists. Einstein is followed by Hawking\/Sagan\/Tyson. Tillich and Niebuhr have no real successors because we can not systematize as we once did. The modernist approach, the last ditch effort to hold all of our life together by even imaginary systems, has sputtered out. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein lack any equals today.<\/p>\n

But the great news is that we do get \u00c9nard AND Laila Lalami, Sinan Antoon, Darwish, Castel-Bloom, Tayeb Salih, and so many more already available to us in English translation. As well as a world of writers famous and influential in their own countries, cultures, whom we might be fortunate to meet in print one day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell 144 pgs. | pb |9780811227049 | $19.95 New Directions Publishing Reviewed by Grant Barber \u00c9nard is a Very Important Author indeed. He belongs on the stage with Pamuk, T Morrison, Morante, Okri, Delillo, J. Mar\u00edas, Vargas Llosa, D. Ugresic, Murakami, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":412692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412602,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412562\/revisions\/412602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}