Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim by Peter Wortsman: Essays in lieu of a Memoir

Peter Wortsman is good company; a raconteur known for his short fiction, stage plays, and translations, such as KONUNDRUM, a translation of Kafka that made me laugh. In EPIPHANY OF A MIDDLE-AGED PILGRIM: essays in lieu of a memoir, he relates the trepidation of being middle aged, as well as the mysteries of a life half lived. In (A forword), he ruminates:

 "The only difference between then and now is an accumulation of doubt. But doubt need not necessarily be debilitating. I dedicate these musings to the defining punctuation mark of middle age: the semicolon, a veritable hallmark of uncertainty."

Wortsman can make the prosaic terra incognito, such as First Memory, where a drawbridge and a child's fear of containing "pipi" merge. In Rough Cuts, there's humorous swagger about the removal of a skin cancer like "a kind of shoot-out at the O.K. Corral." He also creates strangely beautiful moments that are absurd. In Spirit Tree, a wild sapling in the family house in Queens, New York, grows to a gigantic totem of his parents' native Vienna, in Queens, NY, evokes his parents; idyllic strolls in Vienna, before fleeing the Nazis. 

 

My favorite piece may be about the recent lockdown in NYC. Nostalgia for the Norm: Obervations in the Vale and Vector of the Virus (An Afterword).  Here is an excerpt.

    "The other day, for no apparent reason, an angry teenager walked up to me and butted me in the chest. It was not a friendly greeting

    "Is this the new norm?"

    "I have stomped the same circuit of streets and exhausted novelty on my limited nightly trajectories. Upon returning home I escape into my imaginings. Of late I have tried to envision our microscopic adversary, variously depicted on internet sites either as an abstract expressionist pattern of tinted stains, or in 3-D representations as cauliflower-like gobs, or else as spherical entities with extended knobs, miniscule invaders, streamlined and downsized since the advent of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but invaders all the same.

    "Despite all, I cannot help but be awestruck by the dogged determination of the virus, its resilience and stubborn resolve to proliferate."

    POST SCRIPT

    This book was compiled in lockdown as a virtual SOS in a bottle in the time of the virus. May it be retrieved by receptive readers in the future, when social distancing will, hopefully, be a morbid memento mori, streets open for strolling, friends once again embraced, and masks worn only, of necessity, by surgeons in the ER, superheroes on screen, celebrants at costume balls, and hoodlums on a heist."    

                                                                                                        New York, January 15, 2021

***

Kafka spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man's cosmic predicament. --John Updike

Why a new translation of Kafka?  Don't we already know The Castle, The Penal Colony, Metamorphosis, The Hunger Artist?  Perhaps we know too much about Kafka?

In KONUNDRUM: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Peter Wortsman, (Achipelago Books) I met a Kafka I had never known but long suspected. Wortsman has said Kafka laughed aloud, when reading his work, as did others. Not being a translator, I have imagined a direct line from Kafka's K to Philip K. Dick. I liked a production of The Hunger Artist, as a sporting event in Madison Square Garden. The laugh's not from the belly, but from the pained heart, especially ironic in our 21st century. 

Besides classics; Metamophosis retranslated as "Transformed," The Penal Colony, The Hunger Artist; Wortsman selected  letters, journals, darkly comic parables, fairy tales, reflections, even aphorisms, This is the first volume in English to have Kafka's very humane personal letters and journal entrees alongside his major works, The result is that you get a unique sense of the writer's "voice," who Kafka is, with little separation between the man and the writer.

Wortsman, who is both a fiction writer, and a translator, changed the way I think about Kafka. Along with ironic chuckles were surprised guffaws, as thoughts circle back to unexpected endings, like in "The Bridge." For me "Transformed" (Metamorphosis) was a dark fantasy that moved to real and hard truth about human relationships. Then there is the wit, just for fun. Who would think of poor Poseidon, saddled with accountancy of the seas?  Here is an example from this volume.

THE BRIDGE by Franz Kafka

I was stiff and cold. I was a bridge. I lay over an abyss. With the tips of my toes on this side, my fingertips dug in yonder, I clung to the crumbling clay. My coattails dangled at my sides. The icy trout brook thundered below. No tourist ever strayed to this forbidding precipice, the bridge was not yet inscribed on any map.So I lay and waited. I had to wait.Barring collapse, no bridge once built can ever stop being a bridge.

Once toward evening--was it the first, was it the thousandth time, I don't know--my thoughts were always muddled, running in circles. One summer evening, the brook thundered darker than ever, I heard the sound of a man's footsteps!  Advancing toward me, toward me. Stretch yourself out, bridge, mend your rift, you rafter without sail, hold up the one entrusted to you! The uncertainty of his step levels off out of earshot, but if he falters make yourself useful, and like a mountain goat hurl him safely across.

He came, with the iron tip of his hiking pole he tested me out, then with it, raised my coattails and arranged them neatly on my torso. He jabbed the tip into my bushy head of hair, and probably peering wildly about, left it dug in. But then--I was just then dreaming of mountains and valleys--he leapt with both feet into the small of my back. I writhed in excruciating pain, altogether ignorant of the identity of who or what bestrode me. Who was it? A child? A dream? A highwayman? A suicide? A tempter? A wrecker? And I turned myself around to catch a glimpse. Bridge upends itself! I had not yet managed to turn over completely when I tumbled, I tumbled and already I was torn to shreds and pierced by pointed rocks that had always peered so peaceably from the bed of the rushing river.


I would suggest you, like I, might enjoy a new look at this darkly comic genius. Could we call him pre-cognitive of both the 20 and 21st centuries?  In this translation, he's a man for any time.

S.W.