Translated from the Ukrainian by Magdalena Baran-Szołtys
I.
In the early morning hours, my nephew called. Someone has died, was my first thought when I saw the familiar number light up, someone must have died. Otherwise Igor wouldn’t call in the middle of the night. But who? Father or mother? Just a few seconds; a few seconds to prepare for the worst. But what was the worst in this case?
Sometime at the end of the noughties I found out that my father had been keeping a diary. And I wondered: that my father kept a diary had more than amazed me. He didn’t read books (not even mine), didn’t write letters, and of course wasn’t active on social media. Social media? Completely absurd, he owned an old Nokia and spoke into it so loudly that he basically could have saved himself the phone call, at least for conversations with the neighbors. But he read newspapers. He had been doing so since Soviet times. Every day he bought some tabloid, read it from cover to cover, and put it in a desk drawer. When I came to visit, I read his ten-year-old newspapers. And a kind of diary as well: a sad diary of disrupted communications, newspaper poetry of politics and crossword puzzles. But this diary—why?
He made his entries on notepads, which he didn’t keep secret. On the contrary, he willingly pushed the notes in one’s direction and permitted us to look. Strange notes they were—written by a person who had hardly ever picked up a pen in his life. It was the writing of a person who gave no thought at all to his handwriting. A kind of chronicle of the passing time in his immediate environment, a record of familiar details—where he had been, what he had seen and heard, what he had spent his money on, who had called him. He noted all the amounts of money I gave him (which greatly impressed me), recorded the temperature. Dry, cool facts. Few assessments, a minimum of feelings. As if he wanted to say something but didn’t dare.
Writing reveals us, it personifies us. But it also depersonalizes us. If we don’t have experience and can’t handle it properly, if we can’t make writing serve us, we simply lose our intonation, we lose our voice, we fabricate letters, put them into words, form sentences out of them, take stock of time, which offers no clues except for the weather. And so, when my father set out to write, he fell into this trap as well and did not know how to free himself of it—he attempted to talk about important things, tried to capture the essentials, wrote about all of us with a foreign script, the script of a person unknown to us.
It happens quite often that people who use everyday language in normal life, people who feel certainty or doubt, joy or despair, people without “snappy writing,” suddenly lapse into a stilted tone when they undertake to communicate something to someone by letter. They write the way they imagine the letter—in a colorless dead language using uncommon words and useless phrases. Writing is like a river—by no means everyone who gets into the water cuts a good figure.
In his diaries, my father was unusually defenseless. The attempt to write about important things immediately revealed all his weak points. The weak spots were, of course, all of us. He loved us, worried about us, thanked us. All of this in a dry, awkward, somewhat bookish language that, despite everything, betrayed his feelings—feelings of tenderness and concern that he would never have displayed in daily life. I had to read his entries on the weather to understand how important we were to him. The great magic of writing is to be able to express joy and sorrow even with numbers.
It was Christmas. The night was long and damp. I just wanted to lie back down and go back to sleep. To not have to think about it for at least a while. So I did: I turned off the phone and sank into darkness. At some point I woke up and immediately remembered that he had died. I wish I hadn’t slept, I thought, then I would have been spared the memory.
II.
The habit already as a child: to write about everything I see, about everything my eye catches on. The eye is necessary for catching on things. You observe the human world like a pediatrician observes the tots in the park—with love and with the willingness to make a diagnosis. Is that bad? Yes, definitely. Although, what am I saying? No, of course it isn’t.
That’s the appeal of writing: you treat the world like a potential text, using it as material, setting yourself apart, stepping out. You can write about anything, literature allows you to do so without demanding anything back. The poetry of life is identical to the poetry of death.
In writing you can convey things that cannot be grasped in ordinary words, you can capture the smallest flashes of childlike memory, you can dispense with those “ordinary” words that convey nothing, that show the powerlessness of your banal everyday language in the face of all the riddles and mysteries of life. Where does this all begin? With the intuitive sensing of which fluctuations language is subject to, with the sensation of how the intensity of the flow of speech changes, how language is compressed and disintegrates, how it becomes faster and slower, dense or permeable, depending on what you are talking about. The realization that the language you use to talk about a tree in spring is completely different from the language you use to talk about a tree in fall. The realization that everything depends on this difference—your perception of time, your perception of space, the melody of your sentences.
The constant desire to share your enthusiasm, this is what forces you to search for words, to rearrange them, to plunder words like birds’ nests, to shake them, to turn them upside down. It all begins with enthusiasm, with devouring the stories of the ancients, and sharing those stories later with your peers, living with the stories, growing up, being shaped by them. The excitement of colors and scents, of objects and voices, of changes in weather and mood. The enthusiasm for the order of this world, for its imperfections, openness, and depth.
The enthusiasm for how easily day and night, sun and moon, eagerness and fatigue change before your eyes. The enthusiasm for the fact that you live in the midst of these trees, in the midst of these men and women, in the midst of demons, in the midst of protectors. An enthusiasm that simply tears at your lungs—the best that could happen to us, has happened to us, we were born right here, in the center of this wondrous universe, at the intersection of all painful and sweet lines, under the sky of the happy and the rebellious. I love everything that is given to me, I just have to share it. I just have to talk about the joy and bitterness, about the sorrow and melancholy. For this I have a thousand books to read, for this I have writing. Generously I want to share, feeling that the enthusiasm does not diminish, feeling that neither sadness nor disappointment nor mistrust can replace it. Generosity that does not destroy. Joy that does not make reckless. Death that does not frighten. That does not frighten at all. ■
Excerpts from: Serhij Zhadan, Antenne. Gedichte. © der deutschen Ausgabe Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2020.
In “The Telephone Book of the Dead,” published in 2020 and written during the ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine, Zhadan commemorates his deceased father and exposes the existential importance of language and literature in the face of war, death, grief and memory. —MB
Magdalena Baran-Szołtys is a scholar of literature and culture with a background in German and Slavic Studies working as a postdoctoral researcher within the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna (Austria). Her research interests include German, Polish, and Ukrainian literature; narratives of inequality and transformation; travels; memory cultures; postsocialism; Austrian Galicia; and the social and cultural history of East Central Europe.
To learn more about Serhiy Zhadan, read this introduction by Ostap Kin.
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