When we were kids in Texas we used to swim every morning in a river near the house we painted red. One day we saw what we thought was a dead child but it was half a dead pig wrapped in magazine centrefolds caught up in the reeds and stinking blue. When our father died my brother cried and I didn’t. We moved to Europe with our mother and lived without money for two years in a top floor apartment where we felt too hot or too cold and always hungry. My mother wrote but no one cared. She worked some days. She hung a picture of our father on the wet wall. We huddled scared and learned the language and we listened to the dying Algerian woman who lived below us, and her living sons rattled the doors. My brother was raped twice in the stairwell, once by cops. I carried a knife and spent a year with my head caved in. Our mother died of course. My brother went to New York and I didn’t. I came here with a girl I knew and her daughter and we have not moved since. Not a muscle.

My brother is an indie music star, half famous now, and we have not talked in many years and in interviews he says he was an only child and he tells the story of the dead pig but not the story of the Parisian stairwell. I understand this. I love my brother. And I will kill you if you hurt him. I will kill you if you hurt him. I will kill anyone.

There was a bad smell in the alley of dogs or shit or kitchen scraps but as soon as he noticed it he placed it somewhere – somewhere else – he allocated it a place and it stayed there and did not bother him unduly. The taller boy had a small rip in the shoulder of his t-shirt where the seam had parted, and he stared at the teardrop shape of the skin there as if there was something particular in it that he wanted, something that was not available to his hands which were on the boy’s waist, on his back, beneath his t-shirt; or to his lips, which were on the boy’s lips, his cheek, his neck. His eyes returned again and again to the tiny piece of skin on this shoulder. As if it was more important. The other boy, the redhead, stood back a little, an outstretched arm running a hand over the others’ bodies, and he turned to him, and reached out, and pulled him to them, so that their three mouths met and kissed, and their lips hesitated in the tiny triangular space between them, and their tongues danced in the air, a holy breath, a spirit, a trinity of desire, creating something out of the gap between them that they wanted to close because it was not possible to close it. And as soon as he had thought of that he thought of something else. A hand slipped under his waistband, touching his arse. That was the redhead, he thought. He shivered but it was not cold. He looked again at the tall boy’s shoulder. He moved his head, bent it, bowed, and kissed that important patch of skin, as if it were a relic, a sacred place. His body hummed. His tongue tasted the dry sweet consecrated flesh, but it seemed not to be what he had thought it was. He felt for the tall boy’s cock, felt it through the cheap rough fabric of his work trousers. He sucked his tongue and bit his lips. The redheaded boy was rushing them. The alley was patient. There was no noise but the holy spirit and the night. He unbuckled the boy’s jeans, pushed them down, tugged at his underwear, felt his hard warm cock in his hand, squeezed it, awoke. He awoke. They were three boys in an alley. He knew it was hopeless. He knew it even as he dropped to his knees and tasted the tall boy’s cock in his mouth like the taste of warm bottled water on a beach in the summer. He knew it even as he took the redhead’s cock as well. He knew it as he stood and they together unclothed him and the tall boy bent and kissed his chest, his stomach, and the redheaded boy kissed his buttocks, parted them with his lips, licked his hole. He knew it all the time. He stared at the teardrop shape of skin on the tall boy’s shoulder and he knew. It was hopeless.

Daniel Zawadzki, Chłopców I Dziewcząt, 1976.

O’Reilly on the other hand, in both his early stories and in the novel Watermark, presents the countervailing view of the body as host, as accommodating platform for, as it were, excursions elsewhere, into the world external to the body. So it is that the mind/body self/nation tension of the writers I have examined in the preceding chapter is both subsumed and externalised as a personal worldly discomfort expressed in terms of sexual misalignment, not with the erotic other, but with the self consciously divided self, projected outwards, with both the cover of irony and the cover of sincerity. The frustration/celebration has become one of the failure of expression to ease the discomfort of repression. Release has not released us. The dog barks still. This finds its obvious political metaphor in O’Reilly’s most accessible work, the novel The Swing Of Things, in which the flirtation between repression and expression, hiding and revealing, finds fractured (and occasionally unified) representation in the failure of the “peace process” to “process” anything at all other than its own terms, leaving the debris of unreconciled opposites – past/present, violence/love, responsibility/self expression, city/nature – foregrounded as the contemporary furniture of Irish literature. But what sort of furniture is this? What sort of chairs and tables and dressers are we here confronted with? And where, it might be asked, does one hang up one’s coat?

Max Schilling, Die Enttäuschung der zeitgenössischen irischen Literatur, 2010.

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[taken from a series portentuosly entitled Fragments Of Mistranslations From Books Trapped Outside English By A Writer Trapped Inside English And A Dying Body, some of which appeared, mistranslated as Translations From Uninhabited Books, in The Stinging Fly, Issue 16/Volume Two.]

The dream of sublime integration with a more comfortable world of open fields and clear skies and clean water, where one may experience, if not freedom, then a feeling of freedom of movement – both literally and in the sense of one’s conversation and thought and daily diversions – this dream has become mired. The skies are thunderous, the water is brackish, the fields have turned to muck. Instead of relaxation, the post communist state has introduced, of course, a febrile and all pervading competition. The threat has now become not one of potential state interference, where one might be punished for some perceived breach of law or etiquette or mere thought, but the risk of personal failure, where one might be punished for some imperceptible breach of the unwritten laws of success, aspiration, doing well, making the best of things, playing along. Playing along is common to both of these paradigms, as it is common to all. But our participation is no longer the point. It is no longer worth anything. Or, to be more precise, it is no longer worth anything to us. We cannot bargain with it. Playing at not playing along is, in the new Poland, a much more difficult role. There is no script. There is no clear model. There is no encouraging geographically located chorus of encouragement. No promised land. No West. If you choose to opt out of this game, you must find your own way. And you will not be rewarded with martyrdom or alarm or notoriety or opprobrium. You will simply be ignored. The best you can hope for is a casual dismissal. You are no longer a subversive, a freedom fighter, a dissenter. You are, at best, an eccentric. You do not threaten the game. You entertain the players. You are, in what is the most cruel appellation of this crushing neoliberal capitalism … an individual.

Olga Dudek, Od tego czasu Polska, 2006

My visit to the house of the poet is presaged by storms and a delayed ferry, on which the smell of vomit, when it finally takes to the seas, is overpowering and yet reassuring, reminding me as it does of nature’s casual dominance over us, and of our casual dominance over its recurring reminders. I recall the long work Legion Hall And Its Breakages, in which McLoughlin stamps his own melodramatic mark on this theme with his disordered lines of fluff and howlers, which ruin the new church and pins the altar boy beneath God’s hard beam, an Isaac formless, no test this time.

McLoughlin meets me at the door, his nearly eighty years not affecting him with much more than an attractively lined face and a slight hesitation on downhill slopes. His small cottage, warm and clean, faces south across a bare descending hill to the sea, the view spoiled only slightly by some ugly farm buildings and a scattering of sheep. The sea itself – turbulent, bruised, noisy – seems to delight him. His gaze turns to it automatically in every idle moment. All the chairs in the house seem angled towards a seaward window. His work room is lined with notebooks which he will not allow me to look at. Their spines suggest they are all the same. Whether full or empty I cannot tell. He has two dogs and a cat. There is a typewriter. There is even a small laptop computer, “for the emails” he says, and a telephone. But on his desk there are only two notebooks, a larger pad covered in doodles, and a tub full of pens and pencils. “I work very inefficiently” he tells me. “I lose lines. I can spend a day looking for a line I wrote last week. And when I find it, it has changed. Of course.” He pours us some fresh coffee and offers me breakfast. I decline, and he looks crestfallen.

“You must eat” he says. “Look at you. You are thin as paint. Please, I have bacon, sausages. Fresh eggs from the farm. You have never tasted eggs like them. Look! Look at this bread! Baked this morning, a mile from here. I have pudding, dense black pudding like treacle. What is wrong with you? You must eat! You must!”

He is almost angry. I still feel nauseous from the ferry. I nod. He begins to cook, and soon the small steamy kitchen is filled with the smell of frying. I think of his lines in Potter’s Last Morning, in which the sun fries an egg of land and sizzles the grass like rashers, and I excuse myself in search of the bathroom, but find only the front door, and the hill to the sea, and in the fresh blast of salty wind I roll down there in my own stomach like a ferret over a cliff.

Nathaniel Körtig, Die Dichter, 2006

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[taken from a series portentuosly entitled Fragments Of Mistranslations From Books Trapped Outside English By A Writer Trapped Inside English And A Dying Body, some of which appeared, mistranslated as Translations From Uninhabited Books, in The Stinging Fly, Issue 16/Volume Two.]

Her fingers, as with the levers of a terrible engine, dragged in a crawling and inexorable fashion the instrument of her hand along his naked leg, to his knee and his thigh. He could not breathe. The window filled his eyes, and he stared through its dirty glass, over her shoulder, into the smudged blue of the distant and impenetrable sky. He felt that he was not where he was. But he was not far away either. He was not, for example, in the sky. Her device encountered the material of his underpants, a thin layer of cheap blue fabric separating her knuckles from his squirming scrotum. He breathed and examined the glass that sat against the sky. The hand exerted pressure, precisely measured as if by detailed calculation, against his balls. She kissed his neck and his ear. He could smell her shampoo like a metal after rain. He could feel his penis strain his underpants and he knew that it was exuding a small dark oily patch against the blue where the tip was, and he knew that he was elsewhere, not in the sky, but not here either – in just his underpants on the bed with this girl. He was in the glass. He was in the glass between the girl and the sky, and he was smudged like the glass. Her finely crafted fingers operated in accurate configuration with the outline of his half remembered fears and their psychological neighbours his hopes, and manoeuvred their way under his balls and pressed against his body there, and his eyes closed. He was the glass.

Daniel Zawadzki, Chłopców I Dziewcząt, 1976.

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[taken from a series portentuosly entitled Fragments Of Mistranslations From Books Trapped Outside English By A Writer Trapped Inside English And A Dying Body, some of which appeared, mistranslated as Translations From Uninhabited Books, in The Stinging Fly, Issue 16/Volume Two.]

The sun over the desert is not, according to this point of view, capable of either heat nor light, and the desert itself produces the sun. The sun exists, but it only exists in the desert, which cannot be said of the desert, in its relation to the sun. The desert creates the sun. Without the sun the desert is not a desert, and the apparition of Angelica Huston offering a cure tonic is impossible. The desert fulfils its particular function here – it creates everything upon it, and as such is the plateau of possibility necessary for the story to end. For the story can only end in possibility, in a widening out – something which we see literally as Neeson and Brosnan walk off in different directions. Their wounds are surely fatal, their most recent experiences are almost certainly hallucinations, and yet it is impossible to say which one of them is hallucinating the other, and whether the desert, which is the engine of this denouement, is complicit with us the witnesses, or with the protagonists, thereby making us the victims of our own hallucination, or with the sun, which would make of all of us – witnesses and protagonists alike – useless germs in the heat.

Francesca Pasquale, Hollywood Frainteso, 2009

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[taken from a series portentuosly entitled Fragments Of Mistranslations From Books Trapped Outside English By A Writer Trapped Inside English And A Dying Body, some of which appeared, mistranslated as Translations From Uninhabited Books, in The Stinging Fly, Issue 16/Volume Two.]

It’s been raining now for eleven days. Small Ellen went yesterday to see her uncle, who lives near the west gate. She endured the admonishments he likes to deliver, and returned to us with seven silver coins and a porcelain bowl. We got nearly forty silver coins for the bowl from Hagger. Small Ellen demanded a meal at Stintow, and who were we to argue. She had two deserts. Last night we slept in the hotel by the curved church. The beds were soft and cool and the water we washed with was clean.

Today Flum killed a policeman. It was a mistake. We are running now and have no disguise. All the city’s signals are flashing and we are at the mercy of the wide walls and the narrow gates. Small Ellen has a cough. I fear the worst.