Translating Turned Into Writing: A Conversation with Harald Voetmann

Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, Awake is the first book of Danish author Harald Voetmann’s dark, unsettling, funny, and ultimately tender trilogy about humankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature. In advance of its publication on 25 August in Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen’s celebrated translation, Denise Rose Hansen spoke to Voetmann about the novel, how it emerged through a translation project, and how he adapted its structure from antique drama. We hear about why Voetmann was drawn to capturing in fiction the life and times of Pliny the Elder, and what this Roman eccentric reveals about our own despairing age of man-made climate catastrophes. But as Voetmann reminds us, yearning and kindness often arise from darkness.

Harald, you’re a poet, a short story writer, a novelist, a translator, and a scholar. What was it about Pliny the Elder – as a historical figure, an author, and a human being – and about the novel as a form, that drew you to writing Awake? And can you tell me about how you found the novel’s structure of juxtaposing Pliny’s narrative with quotes from his encyclopaedic Natural History?

I am fascinated by Pliny’s Natural History (Latin: Naturalis historia) in several ways. It is obviously interesting as a source of antique conceptions of the world, and Pliny was also regarded as a scholarly authority throughout the Middle Ages, although he does not really contribute personally with any substantial knowledge. He collects popular ideas and the thoughts of other authors, more or less uncritically, which results in this wonderful cornucopia of observations, superstitions, and rumours. But I was also interested in the voice and style of his prose. The mixture of bone-dry lists and these sudden outbursts of feeling. His fundamental pessimism is, to some extent, a compassionate pessimism, unlike the uncaring cynicism of other Roman writers such as Cato or Varro who really do not give a shit. Pliny is not blind to the suffering of both humans and animals. He is deeply troubled by it. He is a proud Roman patriot and military macho man, but also constantly despairing over the pain and futility of existence.

I was working on a translation of a book of excerpts from the Natural History. It was to include excerpts from books 7–11 (the ones about humans and animals), but the process of writing Awake took over, and so it ended up only being from books 7 and 8. Translating turned into writing. I knew that I wanted to engage my writing with Pliny’s work in some way, but I had not imagined that it would turn into a sort of historical novel. But the theme demanded that form.

Pliny’s work is an attempt to challenge Nature and to force Nature to respect him. He states this bluntly at the end: ‘You must now respect me.’ At the same time, he is probably best known for his death in a natural disaster, the eruption of Vesuvius. Since it can be seen as a classic case of Hybris/Nemesis, the idea of classical drama presented itself naturally as a form for telling his story. The plurality of voices stems from that, and the use of quotes from the Natural History are a sort of choir. But the frame of classical drama also sets some limitations. The death scene, for instance, could not be acted out on the stage of the book, so it is only described in an appendix.

As such, the book adheres to the form of the antique drama. An unnamed narrator delivers the prologue. After that, scenes with a bit of storyline (episodes) are mingled with more meditative passages (stasima). The plot is minimal, but there is still a sort of unveiling towards the end.

We recently published an excerpt from the novel on our website. In it, Pliny the Elder wonders about digestion, and whether the human body breaks down food ‘by thermic powers’ alone. He makes the point that if a portion of porridge is sewn into the belly of a pig, and then heated, it doesn’t noticeably dissolve. Passages like these do so much to viscerally conjure up ancient life, and elegantly show that Pliny the Elder’s relentless search for truth always balances on the scale of Roman ignorance. To what extent, I wonder, did you extract these gory details directly from Pliny’s Natural History and other ancient texts?

I have used many different literary sources, but I used them with great freedom. I felt that I was imitating an antique drama, not writing a realistic novel. It is often closer to puppet theatre than to modern realism, but that feels appropriate since it is about unfreedom and being bound by compulsions and urges. I also wanted to let the world of the book be subject to the laws of the world described in the Natural History. So in this world, humans and animals can spontaneously combust, sexual organs can instantly change from one biological gender to another, and stars can fly about freely in the air. That is Pliny’s world, and I did not want to rationalise it.

Natural History is the largest single work that has survived from the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder aimed for it to be scientific, but its exactness is, to say the least, dubious. I think much of the novel’s humour flows from this gap between what we know now, and what Pliny couldn’t possibly have known then. But at the same time, I feel culpable about my own smugness when smirking at Pliny’s unsound deductions, such as that it is the presence of a soul that facilitates digestion (which, in a sense, is not even entirely incorrect!). Is this smugness part of the problem you’re encircling in your trilogy – that humankind is screwed precisely because we think we know, or think we are able to know, everything? Does our world’s collapse start with Pliny?

I think Pliny can be genuinely funny, but also involuntarily comic sometimes. When he matter-of-factly passes on the information that goats breathe through their ears, for example. He could very easily have examined that, but he prefers to believe his source because it is some Greek authority. In other places, he creates or retells poetical lies to cover up the unfathomable. I like those lies a lot better than the lies of the modern world, which tend to have the purpose of selling something rather than patching up a hole in our comprehension of the world with poetry.

What really interested me was his hatred towards nature, that is, the goddess Natura, whom he calls humankind’s wicked stepmother. His work is an attempt to overpower and control Nature, and it can get very aggressive. He hates Nature for her cruelty and seeks to rebel against her with his work. At the same time, he was an adviser to the emperor Vespasian, who built the Colosseum; an arena that was to be filled with all the distant peoples and exotic animals that Pliny writes about, and where the eternal struggle between species, which Pliny calls the ‘game of Nature’, was to be staged. This time not for the cruel enjoyment of the goddess, but instrumentalised for the glory of emperor and empire.

I was intrigued to find such an aggressive and hateful voice at the root of Western natural philosophy – although I can also sense the despair in that voice, and occasionally its compassion with living beings. No one talks about nature like that now. But romanticising and idealising nature in our language, literature, and philosophy does not lessen the harm we are doing, and which I imagine Pliny might even have applauded. In face of the man-made climate catastrophes, I wanted to bring back this aggressive and despairing voice and let it gloat a bit over the destruction of nature.

The novel often moves between the flighty – musings on the soul and the nature of consciousness – and the concrete, usually base, reality of matter. What did this economy between the abstract and the tactile offer you, and what might it tell us, do you think, about ancient Roman life?

That is part of the tragic subject; humanity trying to control nature while in nature’s grasp and caught up in its own nature. Even the gods are unfree, at the mercy of urges and impulses, as Homer and Ovid portray them. Tragicomic figures. Historical fiction is often full of dirt and squalor for shock effect – and I do think it is good to ‘remember the body when time travelling’, as I once heard Sjón say – but here it also has to do with Pliny’s aspirations to overcome the natural world that he sees as base and horrifying.

In the excerpt, Pliny studies himself in the mirror and describes his own body as such: ‘Like ten eggs broken on the point of a spear, so oozes the flesh.’ I can’t help but think of the question of embodiment in 20th-century existentialism, and a scene in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée in particular, where Roquentin describes his countenance in the mirror until he, like Pliny, is too disgusted to go on. Could you speak about how you worked with perceptions of the body in Awake, and whether you in any way view it as an existentialist novel?

The mixture of fear, contempt, and hatred toward the feminine is everywhere in the Natural History. There is not much pure beauty here and no desire that is not mixed with negative emotion and suffering. Very Roman perhaps, but also much more than that. That state of mind must result in contempt and hatred for anything that has to do with the body.

There is not much free will in Awake, only force and impulse, so I would not call it existentialist. Force and impulse in relation to nature, but also in the relations between people. I would perhaps call it a pessimistic novel. That goes for the other two books in the series as well, but they gradually move towards a still more compassionate outlook. The wish to control nature and humans is transformed and subverted. Awake is as dark as I could make it, but as a whole, the three books move through complete darkness toward a more charitable and mild vision. Loving, even. But that development would not mean much if the darkness was not complete to begin with.

Pliny the Elder doesn’t believe in rest, although he often works in a reclined pose, and the enslaved Diocles is always nearby, ready to take notes for him. No comparison expected here, but could you tell me a bit about your own writing process?

The book, actually the whole trilogy, originated in a single nightmare I had. In Ascea in Italy, near the antique town of Elea. That is also why Awake begins with a quote from Parmenides of Elea.

As soon as I knew that I would borrow the structure from antique drama, I also knew which kinds of text had to be intermingled and what the scope should be. The two other books also borrow their structures from genres of the times they portray. Sublunar takes the form of a Renaissance almanac, where chapters on the different months in a year alternate with stories, poems, pictures, and a part of an alchemical treatise. Visions and Temptations is a description of a journey through Heaven and Hell, a widespread medieval genre. It is important for me to have a fixed form.

I was very unhappy when I wrote both Awake and Sublunar. It came to a full stop while I was in the middle of writing Sublunar and turned into a real depression that made it impossible for me to write anything for about six months. Before that, it had been more a kind of brooding unhappiness that fixed my attention on the work. I was lucky, I found a way out. And it was different with Visions and Temptations. It contains some very dark passages, but they do not reflect anything about the state of mind I was in. But the yearning, and even love, in it, does.

Yes – I’m glad you mention the next two novels in the trilogy, Sublunar and Visions and Temptations, the first of which Lolli and New Directions are publishing simultaneously in the summer of 2023. They introduce the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, and the eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram, respectively. Why did you settle on these three characters for the trilogy – what do they have in common?

Tycho Brahe had the same urge to control nature. In one of his poems, he writes about capturing the Muse of Heaven (Urania) and imprisoning her in his castle that was called Uraniborg. Nature personified as a woman and then this figure of the male conqueror. But, unlike Pliny, Tycho made real changes and his work had enormous consequences, shattering the whole vision of the universe of his day, and challenging the notion of eternity. There was a doubleness to him as well. He was both the exact scientist and a mystic; an astrologer and an alchemist.

Othlo of St. Emmeram was completely trapped in the religious systems of his age. For him, the world was only an illusory veil, and he tried to catch glimpses of the true and eternal beyond it. He looked for signs of divine favour, or the opposite, in everything, and one moment felt sure of his salvation, the next of his sinfulness and eternal damnation. I said earlier that there is a movement towards the compassionate in the trilogy, and that is true. But it was also important for me that the trilogy did not only move forwards in time and thereby came to point at some sort of progress in thinking and science. Because that is only half the truth. We are still deep in the shit and our science has not saved us. So it does not end with enlightenment or modernity and pointing out a way forward. It ends with painful medieval religion, in a place that is more desperate than Pliny’s chamber. In Othlo’s religion, humankind has no dignity at all, and its only purpose is to sing the glory of its tyrant. So I had thought the book about Othlo would be the darkest of the three. And in some ways, it might be. But yearning and love arose in that darkness.

Awake by Harald Voetmann, translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, publishes on 25 August 2022. Purchase your copy here.

HARALD VOETMANN (b. 1978) was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and has written novels, short stories, poetry, and a monograph on the Roman poet Sulpicia. He also translates classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal. Awake is the first in his series of three historical novels: the second centres on the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, and the final book introduces the eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram.

Lolli17 August 2022