Dietro la stazione

Sez Ner #2

by Arno Camenisch, Roberta Gado (Translator)

Un anno, un'infanzia che sembra consumarsi nell'arco di poche stagioni, l'intera esistenza di un villaggio in una stretta valle montana chiusa solo all'apparenza. Qui il mondo esterno si presenta con i treni, il postale e la tivù, ma soprattutto con una lingua, il tedesco, che si insinua nel romancio locale portandovi i fermenti di un mondo che cambia.
Lo straordinario testo di Arno Camenisch ci regala una singolare epica alpina in cui l'innocenza e l'incoscienza dell'infanzia incrociano la quotidianità di un centro popolato da poco più di quaranta anime.
Case mai chiuse a chiave perché gli abitanti si conoscono tutti, ciascuno ha un suo ruolo e partecipa alla storia comune con la propria lingua, catturata dall'autore in una scrittura che nasce dall'oralità e ne mantiene forza e melodia. Ci fa ridere, commuovere e incuriosire descrivendo con gli occhi del piccolo protagonista stalle, animali, malattie e avventure in cui il dramma, la tenerezza e l'ironia si alternano.
Camenisch ci sorprende con storie senza tempo ed echi di una lingua, il romancio, che sembra nascere dalla pietra, risuonare nei boschi e sopravvivere al destino degli uomini.

Genres: Fiction, German Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

More gentle insights from the little-known world of Romansh-speaking Switzerland, from the region's only major writer. Set in a single mountain village, this book casually introduces you to a charming assortment of chamois hunters, farmhands, jass players and squabbling family-members, as seen through the eyes of its unnamed child narrator.

The ingenuous and personable narrative voice represents a shift away from the third-person distance of its predecessor, Sez Ner, although there is still little in the way of psychological complexity here – that's not the point at all. Instead the pleasure comes from careful observation, fresh descriptive passages, and the chance to see some slices of life that have not been forced into any genre conventions; you just get them raw.

He holds the moles out to us. Their fur is soft and there’s dust from the ground on the fur. Why’d you catch them, my brother asks. You’re a funny one, why do you think, because they ruin the fields, eat their way through the roots. And look what you do with it. He holds a mole out to me. I take it. Its eyes are teeny. He takes the other mole in his fist and by hand, click, screws its front paws off, then holds his palm out with the mole’s two paws on it. Hand them in to the commune, they give you one franc twenty for two paws.

Though it's nothing dramatic, there is a lot in here that you just feel you've never read about before. Camenisch's flair for inventive description helps, and his imagery is carefully fitted to his young narrator.

Adolf-dalla-Maria isn’t at home and we climb over the stable door into his dark stable and give the goat courgettes from FrauRorer’s garden. While it’s eating we kneel at its udder and squirt milk into each other’s mouths till the goat kicks out with its hind legs, lifts its tail and shits Maltesers.

On another occasion, the narrator's father, dead drunk, staggers into his room at night and starts talking to him, and we're told: ‘The fish in his mouth swims through his words.’

English readers are fortunate that all this has been tackled by the superstar of Swiss translation, Donal McLaughlin, who has been brilliant in everything I've seen from him. It came up while talking about Is That a Fish in Your Ear? that translators have a tendency to lean more heavily on a standard form of their language than does their source material. (This is OK as far as it goes; much worse is when a translator attempts to incorporate slang but fumbles, which is one of the problems I had with Michael Hofmann's version of Storm of Steel.) Well, McLaughlin is pitch-perfect. This may not be quite such a tour-de-force as Naw Much of a Talker, but it is still a five-star translation. McLaughlin's familiarity with Scots and Scottish English gives him access to a range of subtle effects rooted in register shifts and gradations of dialect. How many translators would reach for a construction like this:

And see if you don’t look after them properly and clean the hutch, we’ll be getting rid of them.

This ‘see if’ is characteristic of Scotland, but it's not some ostentatious or distracting dialectism. Or, later, a simple but equally idiomatic line:

Alfons, in his yellow bus, can toot as much as he wants, Lucas isn’t for moving.

These elements are basic, unflashy, unobtrusive tools, but they are also extremely hard to find when you're trying to translate a sentence from another language, and they combine to give a feeling of perfect fluency which is also infused with a sense of place. Camenisch's writing is never allowed to float around in that kind of vague Queen's-English-translationese limbo to which so much translated fiction is consigned.

And the tension between languages is important to Behind the Station, fictionally and metafictionally. Visitors to the village tend to speak (Swiss) German, but, as our narrator tells us, ‘we don't understand that here. Here, we understand only Romansh, and not always that either.’ Pleasingly, the text is leavened with Romansh phrases – in the local shop, our narrator is asked, Tgei levas and he orders Rösslis ed ina tschugalata Rayon, i.e. Swiss cigars and a Rayon bar of chocolate (tchugalata). The phrase sez la cuolpa ‘it's your own fault’ is a recurring motif. However, the book itself – unlike The Alp – is not written in Romansh but in German.

This is not a book that has a driving narrative, but to get you through 86 pages it hardly needs one. The aim here is not to resolve a mystery or deconstruct a love affair, but rather to present you with snapshots of a particular scene, a particular community. Camenisch's paragraphs are prose postcards of contemporary Alpine village life. Spend a couple of hours here, it'll do you good.

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es passiert nicht viel, aber sprachlich war es unterhaltsam.

[Cherniakhivska · Rating 3 out of 5]

все ж взялася і за другу книжку з трилогії, вона значно приємніша, ніж перша, і не гнітюча, може, тому що це розповідь про дитинство. Тут навіть якщо розбивають комусь голову, то успішно зашивають.

[Antonella Imperiali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un piccolo villaggio nel cantone svizzero dei Grigioni, incuneato in una valle alpina a ridosso del Reno, a pochi chilometri da Coira, capoluogo del cantone. Davanti c’è la stazione. Dietro c’è il borgo. Poco più di quaranta anime lo abitano, qualche negozio, un’officina, tre ristoranti di cui uno chiuso, aie cortili e giardini, stalle, animali domestici. Nessuno chiude a chiave la porta di casa, si conoscono tutti. La vita è tutta li, nel borgo. Poi c’è la stazione che rappresenta il contatto con l’esterno tramite i treni, poi c’è il postale. E poi ancora c’è la televisione che racconta il mondo.
Gli occhi di un bambino osservano e raccontano tutto questo: gli uomini tutte le sere al bar a raccontarsi la giornata, a ricordare altri tempi, a giocare a carte, le donne in cucina, i nonni anziani con i loro acciacchi e la loro fragilità, i giochi con il fratello maggiore e l’unica amichetta che sogna di sposare, la neve, la passione per lo sci, e tanto tanto altro. Un universo intero. Tanti piccoli flash, di poche righe ciascuno, quasi dei fermo immagine che possiamo osservare con il passare del tempo, provando di volta in volta ilarità, commozione, stupore.
E poi c’è il romancio, questa lingua che suona strana all’orecchio e che subisce la contaminazione delle lingue dei paesi confinanti, il tedesco su tutti, ma anche il francese e un po’ l’italiano. Una lingua che a volte fa sorridere, soprattutto se riportata in scrittura da un piccolo ometto birichino. Ho avuto l’impressione che fosse più o meno adattato a “come si dice così si scrive”, più facile insomma.


🌍 LdM: Svizzera 🇨🇭

[DubaiReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Snapshots of life in a Swiss village thirty years ago.

This is the second book in Arno Camenisch's Swiss Literature series, but I did not feel that I had missed out by reading this first. The author was born in 1978 so this would have been set at the time that he was a young boy, like the two brothers in this novella. The brothers seemed quite young, too young to be wandering around the village, but their ages are not given. I think this wandering free was what appealed to me most about the book; I lived in a small village in UK and was also able to wander around in a way that children today are unable to do.

Reading the novella was more like looking through a photograph album; it is made up of snapshots of events, as would be remembered by children. These anecdotes are fascinating insights into life in an isolated Swiss village in the eighties, but I did regret not having kept a record of who's who from the beginning, as this is a cast of thousands.

Reading this as a novella of a hundred or so pages, was perfect. If it had been book length I think I might have lost interest. Now I need to read the two others in the trilogy.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sketches of Swiss village authentic life, short yet touching.
Definitely worth to check out.

Дитинство в швейцарському гірському селі, зворушливі замальовки очима малого бешкетника, який разом з братом спостерігає за життям свого маленького села та бере в ньому активну участь.

Є щось добре і невловиме в цій маленькій книжечці, якісь натяки на недомовленість, які роблять її особливістю і глибшою.

Читайте!

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mit viel sprachlicher Finesse, einem Gemisch aus Schriftdeutsch, Schweizerdeutsch und Romansch, führt einen Camenisch durch ein 42-Seelendorf im Bündner Oberland. Aus der Perspektive von zwei Buben erzählt der Autor in zahlreichen Anekdoten vom Leben auf dem Dorf und bleibt mit seinen „urchigen“ Karikaturen immer sehr humorvoll. Dabei stört es nur wenig, dass das Buch nur über eine wenig vernetzte Handlung zwischen den Erlebnissen der Buben verfügt.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4/5

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine charmante, rührende und gemütliche Schilderung eines kleinen Dorfes, in der Hörbuchversion auch musikalisch, wenn man Schweizerdeutsch mag.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly a year in the life of a Alpine village as told by an unnamed narrator, probably 5 or 6 years old. The tale of a close-knit group of neighbors and the narrator’s extended family. POV and attention span that of a small child, so that the events are pass as a series of two- and three-paragraph vingettes. Comings and goings of friends and neighbors, the passing of the narrator’s grandfather, accidents, near-calamities, relationships and marriages all simply and charmingly described. Essentially a prose poem, given its narrative compactness. Donal McLaughlin’s translation is smooth but yields to U.K. idioms. But I suppose he had to capture Camenisch’s use of Alpine idiom (i.e, deviations from “proper” usage), and had to make such choices. Still, Behind the Station appeals to my bias toward plotless books in which you could say “nothing happens”—except life, as it unpredictably unfurls.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second book in Arno Camenisch’s Alp trilogy and this time focuses on two young brothers growing up in a quiet isolated mountain village. There’s little real narrative; rather it’s a portrait of the local community through the eyes of the child narrator. There’s nothing sentimental or picturesque about the descriptions. This is life as it really is, related in a spare and simple prose that is both atmospheric and convincing. The author writes in a very unemotional way which made it hard for me to truly relate to any of his characters, and I’m glad the book was such a short one, as I wasn’t engaged enough to want to read much more, but it nevertheless drew me in up to a point and overall I enjoyed it.

[See_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arno is talented with language, German and rumantsch mix, really cool and fun to read, specially if you know the places and the type of people.