Tim Wilkinson
'The Fowles of Heauen'-
Transylvanian Style
Zsolt Láng: Bestiárium Transylvaniae. Az ég madarai (A Transylvanian Bestiary. Birds of the Air). Pécs, Jelenkor, 1997, 240 pp.
Our encounters with the books that we take to our hearts are often as haphazard-but, fortunately, not quite so fateful-as the mosquito's meeting with an ancient tome described in the first sentences of this book. Whatever caught my eye, the title or the dust-jacket, when I first saw this particular work in the summer of 1998, I soon found myself under the spell of its language-recognizably modern and yet with heady whiffs of a singular, richly allusive idiom that predates the language reform of Kazinczy and Co. Being able to respond to the book's language, and to the equally extravagant figures and plot lines that it carries, and being able to convey those pleasures are two quite different matters. Confirmation that this is, indeed, a special work came just as fortuitously, a year of so later, on browsing through another work, Az áhítatos embergép (The Pious Mechanical Man), László Marton's illuminating collection of essays and reviews on a range of literary figures, both Hungarian (from István Gyöngyösi onwards) and German (Goethe and Kleist). In ordering my own responses, I have leant heavily from the crucial insights supplied by his discussion of Láng's book (pp. 223-27) and, perhaps, borrowed more of his wording than is proper. However much the ideas may have been embroidered, that fundamental debt has to be acknowledged. Responsibility for the end result is, of course, entirely my own.
The Birds of the Air is the first volume in a planned trilogy under the umbrella title of A Transylvanian Bestiary, the remaining parts of which are currently expected to be published in early 2002. Though Láng was nearly 40 when it was published, I suspect that for most Hungarian readers his book came just as much out of thin air as he did for me, since with the exception of an earlier full-length novel, Perényi szabadulása (Perényi's Liberation), published in 1993, his other, shorter works-Fuccsregény (Dud Novel, 1987), Csendes napok (Quiet Days, 1991) and the quirky short story, A Pálcikaember élete (The Life of the Matchstick Man, 1994)-were all published in his native Transylvania. Like a bolt from the blue, however, the novel attracted considerable critical attention within Hungary-perhaps, as Márton suggests, for reasons which had as much to do with its success in opening up a dialogue with 'old Hungarian texts' as with its novelistic virtues. Clearly, for non-Hungarian readers that specific context is virtually inaccessible. Still, the book offers a sufficient diversity of other levels (and hence approaches) to work for a wide variety of readers, including those who are simply looking for highly imaginative writing on a 'fantastical' theme.
The text is modest in size, of average paperback length, yet it manages both to be sweeping in scope and to pack in an astonishing amount of detail within its twelve chapters. Put very simply, it is a novel about the unrequited, and ultimately tragic, love of two men-the 'evilly' gifted, Mephisto-like Baron Sapré and the 'innocent' Friar Peter-for an adolescent girl, Xenia Vidrányi, set in Transylvania during the century and a half, roughly from 1540 to 1690, when it enjoyed a precarious autonomy from Hungary proper, which was then divided up between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. This is linked, through the figure of Sapré, to a story of a struggle for control of the country, with associated religious strife between Catholics and Protestants, over a timescale that runs from the death of one ruler, Prince Sigismund (or 'Siggie Snail' as he is referred to), the assumption of power by the timorous and selectively deaf Count István, through to his own death as Prince. The action takes place within a span of several years, or at most a decade or two, but cannot be tied down more exactly because it is actually a masterly conflation of 'real' (i.e. historically attested) events and anecdotes from throughout the whole century and a half.
The two plot lines are articulated within chapters that are titled after twelve fantastic bird figures, each with its own characteristics and playing a role within one or both plots, whether operating as spies for Sapré (the grey raven and its replacement, the barking bee-eater), as malignant destructive agents in their own right (the roc bird, cave peacock and snake-bird), or as involuntary carriers of various misfortunes (dust-sparrows, fly-ash birds, the hush-bird), through to the seemingly harmless (phosphor birds, pelican) or grotesquely comical (the voluble, soothsaying human-headed parrot or his dumb opposite, the toad-bird). A few of these-the roc, pelican and several other avian and non-avian species that are also encountered in the book, such as the dragon mentioned in the introduction-are the creatures of traditional bestiaries, as featured, for instance, in the inventory of imaginary beings compiled by the Argentinian maestro Jorge Luis Borges, or the scholarly translation of a twelfth-century Latin bestiary, The Book of Beasts, made by T.H. White (he of the Arthurian-style epic quartet, The Once and Future King, in his academic hat), but the rest are of Láng's own invention.
The plots are separately built up in an episodic and non-synchronous but generally linear fashion, with a sprinkling of jumps and flashbacks, in an intercut, 'jigsaw'-type approach, which might be likened to the reconstruction of the pelican mosaic by Xenia that features in the book's final chapter. The resulting flexibility of the narrative space not only allows the insertion of numerous short scenes, in the form of anecdotes, parables, jokes and other digressions, that add to the diversity of the picture without disrupting the basic flow of the plot, but also makes it possible for the author to adopt and play around with the conventions of a wide range of contemporary literary genres: autobiographies and chronicles, scientific treatises, didactic works, travel novels, children's nonsense books, bestiaries, religious homilies, etc. The fantastic bird stories and the main plots, in their historical settings, always meet in an anecdotal episode. Thus the book is re-charged time and time again with subsidiary motifs, acquiring its richness from these and not from the main current of the plot. Furthermore, the reader, however he may decide to interpret the main plot, is made to view the work from two perspectives at once: from that of the main plot and from that of the anecdote. The common characteristics of the texts that are evoked and cited-what, in the end, endow the novel with its most striking feature-are a high degree of spontaneity of language and vivid descriptiveness. The Bestiary is thus a rediscovery and, at the same time, re-creation of a historically documented (known) world in which Láng plays about with historical figures and the events with which they are associated, constructing and simultaneously dismantling the familiar sign-systems.
It follows that in its aims and construction this is not a 'realistic' novel, nor is it even the 'historical novel' that it may seem to be on the surface. As Láng specifically warns in his introduction: "In this book reference will be made to a known country... to its history..., and yet its Readers do not hold a historical novel in their hand...". As to the book's general stance, he notes:
...people of old too... explored the boundaries of their world; if they lighted on the incredible, they did not reject it in favour of quick answers... but rather attempted to make it credible, with the aid of imaginations nourished by legends and fables. If their imagination proved too slight, they bridged the chasm that had opened up into the unknown with their literary talent, by means of poetry and language. The natural history of bygone times is a peculiar mixture of reality and dream paraded as reality.
Like any 'realistic' novel, however, the Bestiary deals with birth and death, love and hatred, grace and damnation, and an astonishing amount in between. Despite the chapter titles, the book's real concern is with the beasts of the human world in a time when life was particularly nasty, brutish and short, though having its compensatory pleasures. The opening sentences hint as much:
On one page of a scaly-bound ancient tome in the Biblioteca Teleki at Marosvásárhely I came across the characteristically pressed corpse of a mosquito: it looked bigger than those of today, bloodthirstier too on the evidence of a blood stain, large as a carnation, that had seeped into the yellow, parchment-like paper. I could see before my eyes, bending over the table by the light of a candle, a figure, his moustaches glistening from the fats of his supper and the drops of heavy Küküllő Valley wine, who, before retiring to bed, already in his night-shirt, is immersed in the heady delights of reading and for a goodly time does not even notice the pestering mosquito. Then suddenly, with a slap, he smites it mercilessly. Hearkening to the echoes of that blow, filtering down through the centuries, imperceptibly, in reconstructing a story from the past, bit by bit, I began to assemble the visages, habits and motivations of its personć in their fullness.
The episodic, highly anecdotal structure makes it hard to do justice to the many strands that are woven into the main plots. At a more general level, there is a depressing succession of violent deaths, starting in Chapter 1 with the poisoning of Prince Sigismund through the Andalusian beaker and the subsequent beheading of the supposed culprit, George Vidrányi (Xenia's father), nominally on Count István's say-so though actually due to Sapré's skill at ventriloquy. Subsequently we are regaled-to give just a small sample of the less indelicate examples-with the hacking to pieces of Michael Kótai, Kata Sidonia's reminiscence of her father's gruesome death, Gabriel Barcsai's beheading in a rose bower outside the tent of the Turkish sirdar, a flaying alive, and the obscene double crucifixion of Sapré and Xenia at the end of the book. Against that background, the revenge gained by Mansfeld, one of Sapré's men, in return for a crack on the head-he slips a strong purgative into the drink of the architect Master Melchior, who has become obsessed with the task he is set by Xenia of copying the strange hieroglyphics on the leaves of a bush-counts as pure comedy.
Interlaced with the blood, vomit, faeces and body lice, however, is an equally exuberant celebration of eating, drinking, sexual pleasure, and so forth, even if this is rarely unalloyed, more often than not degenerating into grim farce. Some figures and motifs appear briefly, to vanish for ever, others submerge only to re-appear several chapters later, still hard at work at their usually nefarious activities. There are recurrent references to a "vagrant Tartar horde", who first sow mayhem and slaughter amongst the opposed armies of István and Balthasar, which turn out to be on opposite banks of the River Maros. The horde goes on to wipe out the armed Székely escort chosen to conduct the human-headed parrot, elected as king, to his new nation, though we only learn later on, in Chapter 10, that they kidnapped the parrot itself (and incidentally that they also used the hush-bird to cover their own movements). Meanwhile, the Tartars provoke an ill-tempered encounter with the handsome Count Bazsányi, and there are several other casual mentions of them, with a last sighting in the final lines of the book ("the vagrant Tartar horde tamely processed in Indian file across the market square at Kolozsvár"). The boy whom Xenia witnesses being born to the tree-dwelling woman in Chapter 7 springs from the woodwork in Chapter 12 to save her from being stabbed to death by Friar Peter. In addition to the ill-fated Gabriel Barcsai, several of his descendants also pop up, such as a Michael Barcsai, who in Chapter 5 hunts for the roc bird all his life before stabbing himself to death when it finally appears in his house, and a modern-day Nicholas Barcsai, who in Chapter 10 paints a scene of Xenia emerging from underground as Sapré looks towards the roc bird, and in Chapter 11 passes off 'reconstructions' (i.e. forgeries) of the vanished tableaux of Szeben town, originally painted by Johann Lues, the pastor whom the Saxons elect as Prince as a challenge to István.
At a more mundane level, unusual weather conditions (severe rains, snow, fogs, heat-waves) are invoked as factors that influence the direction of the plots or as allegorical accompaniments to events on Earth. Foodstuffs are often lovingly detailed, as in the feast put on by Kamuti at Kata Sidonia's expense in Chapter 4 or, in Chapter 9, the 'anti-banquet' of the cave-dwellers ("the real delicacies were the meats of animals that tumbled in from above, most notably the softer parts of bears, the heart and liver of bison calves, and badger brain"), and, not least, the sampling of a cabbage stew that Barcsai cooked shortly prior to his capture and execution in Chapter 5. Even academic life receives attention, as in the account of how Milotai, Piscator and old Gelei (all based on historical personages) try to identify the wryneck or jynx; Gelei's theories about the proliferation of the fly-ash birds in cheese and human bones; and Friar Peter's efforts, in Chapter 7, to conduct what are recognisably rural equivalents of Galileo's experiments on falling bodies at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, not to omit the alchemy and the strange story of the Bolognese double-bowl used by Sapré to give life to the silver bee-eater in Chapter 6.
The fantastic strands include not only dreams, hallucinations and soothsaying episodes-a Gypsy woman's prophesy of George Vidrányi's death, most of the utterances of the human-headed parrot, the wise-woman of Görgény's reassurances to Kata Sidonia about Sigismund's fidelity - but also a range of 'miraculous' cures: the apparent resuscitation of the poisoned Sigismund, the healing of Father John's gout by a touch from Xenia, or István's recovery from dropsy when the affected parts are licked by the greyhound Snowdrop. The intertwining of history and fantasy also permits a few discreet time-shifts to the present day, such as an almost imperceptible shift towards the description of modern Nagyvárad (Oradea) in Chapter 3 or Sapré's hallucinatory vision of what may be a helicopter, though these are conspicuously written from the point of view of a 16th or 17th century observer.
Much of the detail and anecdotal content of the Bestiary can be shown to be based on specific old Hungarian texts, but the reader (even a Hungarian reader) is not required to have any knowledge of these sources to enjoy and understand the book. As a small example, Chapter 8 (fly-ash birds) includes: an anecdote about a bleary-eyed stable-boy failing to take the hobble off Prince István's horse in the morning, so the horse stumbles all day, giving István a most uncomfortable ride; a reference to a Hieronymus Caraffa, Count of Monte Negro; a paragraph of analysis of the reasons for the failure of István's campaign in Moravia ("For one thing, the weather turned cold..."); a brief description of the outfit in which Sapré clothes the foundling Brambleberry ("a floral tunic of ruby velvet...") and an anecdote about Brambleberry's disgust at having to empty the baron's chamber-pots ("he vomited all over himself")-all of which are derived directly from an authentic memoir, An Autobiographical Description of My Descent to a World Full of Unhappiness, that János Kemény wrote in 1657-58, shortly before becoming Prince of Transylvania. Likewise, the idyllic incident of Prince István catching a trout with his own hands (Chapter 11) follows almost word-for-word a colourful, realistic report about Prince George I Rákóczi which appears in the mid-17th-century Piteous Magyar Chronicle of János Szalárdi, whilst the continuation of that scene (vengeful Székelys hunt and then encircle the fleeing prince) is a persiflage of an early 17th-century report by István Szamosközy (Zamosius) on the death in 1599 of another Transylvanian prince, András Báthory. As these few examples may suggest, the more fantastic a given episode, the more certain it is that some documentable references for it exists. Láng's skill, and modestly concealed erudition, lies in dissecting out what he needs from the old texts and knitting them into his own construction, and the real pleasure is the seamlessness of the resulting fabric. The reader is given access to a densely populated fictional world on its own terms, without needing a privileged body of information in order to explore it.
Láng is scrupulous about leaving the reader to make his/her interpretations. If one may hazard a guess at his ultimate aim, it is to persuade us, by a mixture of guile and genuine shock tactics, into thinking harder about the miseries that we routinely visit upon one another-and, perhaps, into doing something to curb those reflexes. Or is that just wishful thinking? After all, our interpretation of the "Fowles of Heauen"-borrowed as it is from the title that Edward Topsell gave to his manuscript of a translation he made, between around 1610 and his death in 1625, of substantial chunks from Ulysse Aldrovandi's Ornithologia-depends on which of the two homophones springs to mind. As Topsell himself notes in his introduction:
in Philosophie that which is simple goeth first to generation, and that which is compounded goeth formost to Corruption. Therefore the waters more simple than the earthe do first bringe forth fowles and fishes... and these corrupt sooner then the waters.
Tempting as it may be to read the book as an allegory on the precariousness of life within Transylvania and, perhaps, Romania more generally (bearing in mind that what most people would view as the Ceausescu deserved execution a decade ago by no means brought that country's miseries to an end), it does have a wider import. The Bestiary can be seen as a sort of field report of a novelist-as-anthropologist, in the sense of detached, impartial observer of the world, past or present. The conclusions we draw from it as readers are up to us individually, but the following passage from Lévi-Strauss offers some pertinent thoughts:
Biographical and anecdotal history... is low-powered history, which is not intelligible in itself and only becomes so when it is transferred en bloc to form a history of a higher power than itself... It would, however, be a mistake to think that we progressively reconstitute a total history by dint of these dovetailings. For any gain on one side is offset by a loss on the other. Biographical and anecdotal history is the least explanatory; but it is the richest in point of information, for it considers individuals in their particularity and details for each of them the shades of character, the twists and turns of their motives, the phases of their deliberations. This information is schematized, put into the background and finally done away with as one passes to histories of progressively greater 'power'... In fact history is tied neither to man nor to any particular object. It consists entirely in its method, which experience proves to be indispensable for cataloguing the elements of any structure whatever, human or non-human, in their entirety. It is therefore far from being the case that the search for intelligibility comes to an end in history as though this were its terminus. Rather, it is history that serves as the point of departure in any quest for intelligibility. As we say of certain careers, history may lead to anything, provided you get out of it.*
This certainly seems consonant with the closing words of the Bestiary:
All of them were there, in a hundred kinds of garment, interminably repeating the same things over and over again, sheer incomprehension written across their faces, as if they had strayed from an unknown world into a country that they had formerly inhabited.
The waysides of the text not only conceal the eyes of the snake-bird but also scattered, ostensibly throw-away scraps of that kind, which are what Láng surely wants us to spot. For all its linguistic and literary bravura, this is a more deeply felt and thought-through book than is evident on first sight.
Tim Wilkinson
is an editor and translator who spent three years in Hungary in the seventies, subediting academic journals. He has translated a number of Hungarian scholarly books (mainly on history) into English for Corvina, CEU Press and Akadémiai Kiadó.
