Land Without Death

Alfred Döblin

Description

Alfred Doblin (1878-1957) composed his epic trilogy of South America under difficult circumstances of exile. It was accessible on first publication in 1937-38 only outside Germany, and for only a couple of years before war broke out. The first postwar edition, like others of Doblin's works apart from Berlin Alexanderplatz, was little noticed in a Germany traumatised by Nazism and defeat. Neither the pre-war not the first post-war edition explicitly linked the separate volumes as parts of a unitary work. In the 1960s the separate novels were first brought together by Walter Muschg, editor of the first series of Doblin's 'selected works', under the overall title Amazonas. Muschg, however, decided to cut Volume 3 entirely. Not until 1973 did the trilogy first appear in full, in East Germany. Another 15 years passed before the first complete edition in West Germany. So only in the past three or four decades has this work begun to receive the critical attention it richly deserves. The epic

Informations

• Publié par: Galileo Publishing
• Date de parution: 27 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912916832
• Langue: English

Extrait

By the same author and
published by Galileo
Mountains Oceans Giants
Manas




Galileo Publishers, Cambridge
First published by Querido in Amsterdam in 1937 - 1938.
This translation follows the text of the 5 th edition (Walter-Verlag 1988 / dtv 1991), which has been used in all subsequent editions including Volume 14 of the current
Collected Works series published by S Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main in 2014.
Published under licence from the copyright holder.
The first few pages of Volume One were published on the Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation website in August 2018.
Translation and introduction © C D Godwin 2022
Published by Galileo Publishers
16 Woodlands Road
Great Shelford
Cambridge CB22 5LW
www.galileopublishing.co.uk
Distributed in the USA by SCB Distributors & in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd
First Edition
p 482-3 Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus , lines 762ff. Tr. Robert Fagles.
p 708 Tr. G. Barrie 1885 in Goethe’s Works Vol 1 Poems . PD.
ISBN: 9781912916825
All rights reserved.This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed in the EU


Alfred Döblin is the most versatile writer of our time. – J. L. Borges


Contents
Introduction
Notes
Volume 1: Journey to the Land without Death
Part One: On the Amazon
Part Two: The Kingdom of Cundinamarca
Part Three: Las Casas and Sukuruja
Volume 2: The Blue Jaguar
Part Four: Sao Paolo
Part Five: Trek through the Wilderness
Part Six: The Indian Canaan
Part Seven: Noah’s Ark
Part Eight: Turning Point
Volume 3: The New Jungle
Part Nine: The New Jungle
Part Ten: Swansong


INTRODUCTION
by Chris Godwin
From the first page the reader is plunged directly into a world of The Other – vivid, real, three-dimensional, peopled by human beings who behave … not quite like us. What are they up to, the women creeping at dawn down to the river? Their menfolk on the warpath … sympathetic magic … ghosts in the night … Before any clue as to where or when this is happening, we are already deep in the cultural world of Amazonian indigenes.
In his earliest epic novels, written before and during the first Great War, Döblin revealed a rare capacity to conjure up other worlds in convincing colourful detail: 18 th century China with no trace of chinoiserie, 17 th century Europe with no trace of antiquarianism. In The Land without Death (a.k.a. The Amazonas Trilogy ), his imagination fired first by colourful atlases of South America and its ‘river-ocean’ the Amazon, then by reports of explorers, anthropologists, historians 1 , and not least by his own lifelong quest for answers to the riddle of existence, he weaves a vigorous, multi-layered, thought-provoking fictional tapestry from the mid-16 th century Conquest to the late 18 th century end of the Jesuit Republic on the Paraná River, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet. (Note that Döblin provides not a single date: his epic is no dry chronicle, but an imaginative excursion into “deep history” of cultures and mentalities.) His overarching concern – drawn into sharp focus when the narrative returns to Europe in Volume 3 – is to question the trajectory of ‘Progress’ from the Renaissance to the Nazis.
This, the first English translation of The Land without Death , comes unheralded by prior reviews or analyses in English that might help the reader navigate its rich complexity 2 . The Introduction must therefore shoulder several tasks: Summarise the themes that form the warp of the novel, as the weft of events is woven in; Outline the shaping of the narrative; Sketch the biographical and political background; Trace the novel’s fractured publication history ; Examine its critical reception , noting misreadings and misconceptions that current scholarship is decisively correcting.
(1) Thematic summary 3
Nature as an autonomous power
In 1948, looking back on his writing career, Döblin recalled the genesis of his South American epic:
Maps of South America with its mighty Amazon river: what a joy. … I immersed myself in its character, this marvellous river, river-ocean, age-old thing. Its banks, its animals and people belonged to it 4 .
His depiction of exuberant Nature runs as a static counterpoint to the course of the plot – a hymnic celebration, joyfully unfolding Nature’s boundless power. Immense fecundity is one constitutive element: decay and death are also ever-present. Amid numerous depictions of delight, tones of suffering emerge, e.g. a dawn chorus of monkeys changes at once to a lament. Images of suffering and death pile up: a spider sucks a beetle to an empty shell; dead crocodiles float downstream. Nature’s essence lies in the interchange between becoming and decay. At the centre is the mighty Amazon, primal river, descending from the mountains as a ‘monster with billowing mane’ to claim the plains that are its estate. It is the source of proliferating life; but its floods bring dissolution and death.
Humans within amazonian nature
The minds and actions of Amazonian Indians are shaped by the overwhelming power of this life-giving, death-dealing Nature – it is by no means an Indian paradise. A connection among all beings – humans included – is of central significance. Numerous myths of human origin centre on the bond to earthly spirits of Nature. ‘This murichi palm is the ancestor of mankind,’ a chieftain explains to the conquistador Federmann in Part Two. ‘Animals and humans are of one blood, else how could the tapir be our ancestor?’ an Indian tells Bishop Las Casas in Part Three. Such bonds encompass every layer – rocks, plants, animals; they cross time (ancestors are reborn in new children) and space (women refrain from shivering so their absent menfolk won’t show fear).
The Indians exercise caution in every enterprise, and seek constantly to propitiate the dominant power. Naming overcomes the anonymity of a perilous environment: in the first few pages we have a rock called ‘grass’, a village called Toadhole, a watercourse named Yari-yari. (Later on, Spanish horses present a dire threat: not knowing the beast’s name, the Indians have no way to engage safely with it.) But the culture is no mere instrumental technique; the Indians are not antagonists of Nature; they dwell in and with her, in the many phenomena that have relevance to them, that they must try to interpret. Only from a European perspective, where Nature is an object to be known and acted upon, does the Indian stance seem superstitious.
Two myths: the Land without Death, and the Blue Jaguar
The jungle drums that announce the arrival of Europeans bestow on death a new and extraordinary quality: ‘Take care! Great danger… We shall all die… mountains shake. Wild beasts fall upon people… The Dog Star has moved closer to the Moon, and will eat it.’ Now there is no polar balance between life and death: instead, death is inevitable. Hence the imperative need for a Land without Death, a paradise free of ageing, sickness and toil. This entails not just freedom from death’s power, but the dissolution of the Indian life-world. Their one world splits into a Beyond of absolute life, and a Here-and-Now of absolute death. Repeated failures to find this land only bind the Indians more tightly to a hostile world of death.
The motif appears four times in the narrative: in the Conquest era of Volume 1 (Parts One and Three), and in the present day at the end of Volume 3. It is cited by the wretched soldier Puerto, who recognises that the European invaders suffer from the same hopeless yearning – in their case, for the gold they mistakenly believe will remedy their alienation and despair. And the Indians who confront Las Casas’ arguments discover that Heaven is not the fabled Land without Death – for one must die to get there.
Jaguars appear in the narrative with great frequency as (literal) wild animals; as (by analogy) the ravening invaders; as the ancestors of certain tribes; and as a quasi-magical beast (Walyarina). The Blue Jaguar, given prominence in the title of Volume 2 and two chapter headings in Volume 3, is the mythical symbol of total destruction, employed by Döblin as a warning that baleful tendencies in modern civilisation can turn the Indian myth of destruction into a reality.
The Women People
The story of the Women People that frames Volume 1 skilfully foreshadows the central motifs, and provides an interpretive framework for the whole trilogy.
The grim news transmitted by the drums has caused the menfolk of many tribes to abandon their villages and their women. The tribal community, in which the individual is subordinate, is dissolved; the women, who were not even told why the men had to leave, repudiate their inferior status, and in the process become conscious of individuality. This before any direct contact: the culture-destroying myth precedes the Europeans like a curse.
So the women’s uprising is no autonomous development of feminism; it is infected by European masculine structures. The women no longer accept suffering as a given, but grow disgusted with men, and treat them as bargaining chips. The ensuing slaughter of men is inevitable.
At first the women seek an identity fundamentally different from that shaped by a (masculine) culture: they themselves will become one with Nature, even to the extent of taking an animal lover. They self-consciously identify with the great river: ‘Amazonas! It was their river.’ But the Amazon means both life and death; hence the women underst