The French writer and scholar Chloé Thomas has a remarkable essay in Arts of War and Peace called A Wilderness of Mirrors: Eliot, Max Frisch and the C.I.A. that starts:
In 1964, Swiss author Max Frisch published the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein, commonly regarded as one of his greatest achievements. The title, using a form of subjunctive associated with reported speech, which knows no strict English or French equivalent, translates literally as Let’s pretend my name is Gantenbein. Although difficult to summarize, the novel revolves around an unnamed narrator who, after having been left by his wife, invents a number of fictitious characters to help him account for his experience, “trying out stories as if they were clothes” […]
The 1966 French translation of the book was published as Le Désert des miroirs […], a title that, at first glance, seems to be meant as an echo to the “mirroring” theme of the novel, with its interplay of identities, at least one explicit mirror scene (when Gantenbein actually tries out clothes in a shop), and an experiment with mirroring names in an Oriental tale made up by Gantenbein for Lila, with characters named Ali and Alil. Gantenbein’s French translator was André Coeuroy. […] The French title, however, stems directly, it seems, from the one that had been chosen for the English translation by Michael Bullock, which appeared in 1965, a year before the French version: The Wilderness of Mirrors […]. It was T. S. Eliot, obviously, who provided Frisch’s novel with both its English and, indirectly, French titles. Here is the passage from “Gerontion” from which it was taken, towards the end of the poem:
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? […] (Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 38)
She says “Frisch […] read English fluently and had been corresponding with Michael Bullock, but it is not known whether the title was his idea, Bullock’s or the publisher’s,” and continues:
Eliot died the same year as the English translation appeared, and was already part of the international canon by then. It comes consequently as no huge surprise that elements from his poems had found their way as stock phrases. A number of bits and pieces from The Waste Land (“April is the cruellest month,” “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” or simply “Shantih shantih shantih”) or from the essays (“objective correlative” and “dissociation of sensibility”) have been repeatedly cited since their first utterance. However, they have generally not lost their connection to their primary author. The situation of “the wilderness of mirrors” is slightly different in that respect, and the Frisch translation appears to be only a by-product of a more thorough translocation process.
When one searches Google scholars for “wilderness of mirrors,” the vast majority of the results yielded are not, in fact, about Eliot. They are even less about Frisch, although this may also have to do with Michael Bullock’s translation having been reprinted in the 1980s under the more neutral title Gantenbein. Most of what comes up is about counter-intelligence. A narrower search in “Project Muse,” the database of scholarly articles on literature, also provides mostly results related to espionage. The origin of the shift appears to be quite clear: “the wilderness of mirrors” happens to be a phrase recurrently used by James Jesus Angleton, who was chief of counter-intelligence for the CIA between 1954 and 1974, to describe the angst and confusion created during the Cold War by moles and double agents. Now the phrase is quite fitting to describe Angleton’s obsession, and, even though it is once again taken out of its “Gerontion” context, its use during the Cold War can be regarded as more or less consistent with Eliot’s own, more poetic interests in the dissolution of the subject, which are also explored in Gantenbein. The phrase, then, seems to have turned trope in the postmodern context because it did fit the sceptic and relativist stance of these times. One may well believe at this stage that Angleton had come across the phrase in his high school or college days, at a time when Eliot had entered syllabi, in particular via New Criticism (for instance the influential textbook Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, first published in 1938). But the connection runs deeper: Angleton was, in fact, a double agent of sorts.
An English major at Yale before the war, Angleton was an undergraduate poet himself, as well as the editor of the literary magazine Furioso, which published a number of Modernist writers. In that capacity, Angleton corresponded with Eliot, Pound and Cummings. […] In a 1992 New York Times article on poetry and intelligence, Eliot Weinberger writes:
Angleton, who kept reading poetry all his life, claimed in later years that he had always tried to recruit agents from the Yale English Department. He believed that those trained in the New Criticism, with its seven types of ambiguity, were particularly suited to the interpretation of intelligence data.
[…] The complexity of The Waste Land, with its mixture of languages – at a time when translation itself, with the development of early machine translation, came to be understood as a branch of cryptography – and its interweaving of quotations, would make the poem look particularly suspicious, one imagines, to the eyes of someone trained in the spotting and decoding of Cold War double-entendre. “Gerontion” is not built in the same way as The Waste Land, and certainly less prone to be read as a secret message. Yet it would definitely strike a chord in someone interested both in poetry and in ciphers: “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: / How should I use it for your closer contact?” That the poem has to do with an impossibility, or at least a difficulty, to communicate, does not make of it a coded text, but one understands why it could still be read with interest by an intelligence officer.
Angleton’s use of the “wilderness of mirrors” phrase was, then, likely to have been very well informed; what he was taking up, and relatively early on, was not a trope yet, but a fragment that he read in its context, and then recycled for specific purposes. It is really the recycling that made the phrase popular and turned it into a trope, to the point that, in fact, the content and themes of Gantenbein can be regarded as more consistent with Angleton’s use of the phrase than Eliot’s. One is left to wonder whether the Frisch translation was taking its cue from “Gerontion” or directly from the CIA. […]
The phrase then served as a title for a number of books on counter-intelligence in the Angleton years (Evered; Seingalt; Magee; Hill). But it came to be used as well for books about spies in general, for instance a novel by Ed Cambro, in 2008, on an FBI agent plotting a nuclear attack on NYC after 9/11, or a 2012 pulp fiction novel by Ella Skye involving a blonde interior designer and, quoting from the summary provided by the publisher, a “world-weary spy” (Cambro; Skye). Ultimately, it also ended up in other romance fictions: “Through the heartwarming tale of an atypical small-town woman, Wilderness of Mirrors entices us to take ventures as a step toward some measure of self-fulfillment,” reads the presentation of Helen Baker’s 2012 novel on Amazon (Baker). Here, it becomes unclear whether the phrase was conveyed from Eliot by Angleton (and his spies), or from Frisch (and his own provincial stories of adultery and jealousy) via Angleton.
Through counter-intelligence, then, the “wilderness of mirrors” became a trope in the late 20th century, and Eliot entered pop culture through pulp fiction, but also rock albums: Wilderness of Mirrors by Waysted, in 2000, and Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors, by Fish, in 1990. The hyperbolic canonization of an avant-garde author entails in itself the risk of turning them into a provider of kitschy phrases. Eliot praised Ernst Robert Curtius’s 1948 Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittlealter (translated by Willard Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages in 1963), which analysed the “commonplace” in Medieval rhetoric and its influence over modern European literature. The “wilderness of mirrors” seems to represent a modern European “commonplace.” […]
It is striking that the chosen title for the French version of Gantenbein, Le Désert des miroirs, while literally based on the English translation, is not so much evocative of Eliot to a French reader, as of Dino Buzzati’s 1940 Le Désert des tartares (Tartar Steppe in English, both literal translations of the Italian Il Deserto dei Tartari), whose 1949 French edition, in Michel Arnaud’s translation, was a long-lasting success but bears no obvious connection to Frisch’s novel. Eliot is also less visible in Le Désert des miroirs because, in Pierre Leyris’s translation of “Gerontion,” there is actually no such thing as a désert […]
Thomas investigates even more byways, including Chateaubriand’s use of désert to describe the American wilderness, Eva Hesse’s German translation of “Gerontion,” and the Luther Bible. This is the kind of literary investigation I can’t get enough of (cf. my Irony and Pity post). Also, I really need to get back to reading Curtius, and I should give Buzzati a try.
Is that really a good gloss of the German title of the novel? It strikes me as weird and possibly deliberately weird usage, because what does “reported” speech mean when it’s in first person and the speaker is also the person whose speech is being reported? Using the German subjunctive in the third person in a phrase like “He said his name was/were [sei] Gantenbein” typically means, as I understand it, that the speaker is reporting what the third-person denoted by “he” actually said while not necessarily opining one way or another about the truth of that statement. Is the point here that you would only “neutrally” report what you yourself had previously said while distancing yourself from vouching whether what you’d said had been true if it wasn’t true? But it’s been a long long time since I formally studied German and I doubt I ever really mastered the nuances of the subjunctive to the extent they vary from other languages I might know better.
How about Call Me Gantenbein?
I somehow feel like _Let’s Say My Name Is Gantenbein_ would get the irrealis angle across more elegantly than _Let’s Pretend_? Or maybe _Suppose My Name Were Gantenbein_? But what I really want is input from L1 German-speakers about what _Meine Name Sei_ means to them in context as contrasted with _Meine Name Ist_.
Re Chateaubriand, only two centuries ago the part of the U.S. we now often call the High Plains was sometimes called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Desert, because the English word “desert” back then had a wider semantic scope and did not require sand or camels or cactuses. (Per that wiki bit “The term was sometimes used to describe any uninhabited or treeless land, whether or not it was arid.”)
I don’t think it’s got anything at all to do with reported speech, any more than “God save the King” does.
Why not just “Let my name be Gantenbein”?
Angleton was a nasty piece of work. In Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series, which is about a British intelligence unit dealing with Lovecraftian threats, the hero’s boss, an eldritch abomination in the form of an English public school maths teacher, has adopted the name “Angleton” with the express intention of annoying the Americans.
“Gantenbein be my name.” After the model of more quasi-liturgical “Hallowed Be My Name.” (Alice Cooper,1971.)
Back to mirrors: Here’s an excerpt from the abstract of a doctoral dissertation from the end of the 20th century:
“The mirror, by its very nature, encapsulates self and other, identification and alienation, projection and reversal. Throughout my study, I will be referring not just to the use of actual mirrors, but also to the action of mirroring, which—with its doubling, distortion, and deflection—leads to the destabilization that is of peculiar interest to modernism, as well as to post-colonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. I argue that in modernist works, the mirror becomes a central trope for a battle for independence, whether of the colonized subject, of women, of children, or of artists. However, the mirror is multi-faceted, and its reflections often refracted. The struggle is not simply one of liberation (self against other), but also of separation (self from other), and alienation (self as other).”
I was thinking there was some well-known French po-mo Theory book with a name like Wilderness of Mirrors but the closest I came with some quick idle googling was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_of_Production (a “semiotic critique of the political economy of the sign”). Perhaps I was misremembering the 1980 album title Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (by Harold Budd and Brian Eno).
From Eisenberg’s Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik:
This usage is (should be) well known to anyone who knows Latin (a large Latin syntax I just consulted called it even “Iussiv”). It has absolutely nothing to do with the use of Konjunktiv in reported speech. Alternatively, you could also say “Mein Name soll Gantenbein sein” — except that would be a much too clumsy phrase for a title. Or even “möge G. sein” (which sounds, frankly, ridiculous, but that is how we were taught to routinely translate Latin examples of these kinds of Konjunktiv). And it is not just a feature of “literary” or “poetic” language — one of Eisenberg’s examples is from a recipe: “Man nehme eine Bratpfanne und schlage ein Ei hinein.”, another from a math textbook “Dies sei ein rechtwinkliges Dreieck mit A als Hypotenuse”.
I think Call me Gantenbein is the best translation.
Early in his OSS-and-then-CIA career, Angleton had worked closely with a rising-star MI6 operative named Kim Philby. This experience may have led him to excessive skepticism about the bona fides of other Britons, such as his openness to an allegation that the Rt Hon Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent or asset rather than merely a Useful Idiot.
Wikipedia states that the relevant Eliot poem was read at Angleton’s funeral.
Given my own lackluster undergraduate grades I am impressed with the statement in his wikibio that “Despite his intellectual activities, Angleton graduated from Yale in the bottom quarter of his class, having little time for subjects other than poetry, Italian, and literary criticism.”
To an English reader, “Call me Gantenbein” immediately invokes the first line of Moby Dick, one of the most famous lines in all English literature. One should consider whether that allusion is to be avoided. (Per German WP, that has usually been rendered in German „Nennt mich Ismael,“ and in a more recent translation „Nenne mich Ismael.“)
I doubt that any native German speaker would interpret Mein Name sei Gantenbein without any overt verb or other context indicating speech as reported speech. The natural interpretation is as jussive / or optative; “my name be G.” or “let my name be G.” are both valid renderings. This use of the Konjunktiv is literary and a bit archaic, like something out of the Bible or a fairy tale or out of a historical novel, but maybe it wasn’t yet as strongly so for someone of Frisch’s generation.
I think Call me Gantenbein is the best translation.
I get a gold star!
To an English reader, “Call me Gantenbein” immediately invokes the first line of Moby Dick, one of the most famous lines in all English literature.
Well of course, that’s why I chose it. But I see no reason to avoid such allusions, and I call to the witness stand Remembrance of Things Past.
The one thing in my mind that could speak against the translation Call me Gantenbein is that, unlike the German version, it doesn’t exclude the possibility that G. might be the speaker’s real name. I find the unobtrusive, but not obscure allusion to Moby Dick much more attractive than an obscure, pretentious allusion to a (comparatively) little known poem by Eliot, a poet notorious for being dark.
Btw, in the 1970s a novel by Frisch, either Gantenbein or Stiller, was apparently obligatory for the teaching of German in the gymnasiale Oberstufe in Northrhine-Westphalia. We read Stiller (with a young teacher who had not yet finished her Referendariat), apparently most schools read Mein Name sei Gantenbein. Personally I would have preferred (still prefer) Arno Schmidt. But you can’t make a writer obligatory reading in school who ignores German orthography (the first paragraph of Kaff, auch Mare Crisium has “nirgens”, “schtändig” and “zukukken” – and “&” for “und”).
And the first sentence of Moby Dick isn’t “Call me Ishmael.”, but “The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now.”.
I now feel an approximately 60-70%-reliable memory that I was assigned to read something by Frisch for one of my U.S. classes in German back when I was a teenager. Looking at a list of his works, _Homo Faber_ (1957) sounds vaguely familiar in a way his other books don’t, but not quite enough to boost the overall reliability of the memory above the percentage range already given. I certainly do not recall anything substantive from whatever I read in that class, whether it was Frisch or another author.
Is there another Swiss-German author of the same generation (maybe a playwright?) who I might have been equally plausibly assigned to read in a U.S. classroom context in the 1980’s and who I might be muddling up with Frisch?
Dürrenmatt is the other Swiss-German author of that generation.
Well, literally it’s “My name be [strange mangled form of “gooseleg”]”. Of course that wouldn’t work.
That’s what I like best, precisely because of the usage in old-fashioned math problems. “Call me Gantenbein”, with an imperative, is not archaic enough; that would be something straightforward like Nennen Sie mich Gantenbein and would, as mentioned, not exclude the possibility that that’s his real name.
I always took for granted that it’s a deliberate archaism. But to be fair, I haven’t read the book or even encountered a copy, just seen the striking title quoted…
NRW indeed! Where I’m from, /ns/, /nds/ and /nts/ are three different things…
And the first sentence of Moby Dick isn’t “Call me Ishmael.”, but “The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now.”
When people read books aloud to each other back then, did they skip the introductory matter, quotes from the Greek, all that?
@ulr: Thanks, Dürrenmatt certainly also sounds vaguely familiar, but when I look at a list of his specific works, none of the titles ring a bell of the “oh I remember reading that” tone, although we’re talking 42 years ago or so and that none of those titles specifically ring a bell does not strengthen the “so I must have read Frisch’s Homo Faber” theory beyond where it started.
@ JW Brewer. I think you might be right? When I was taking German in college in the very late nineties, Homo Faber was assigned to us. I can’t remember if in extract or in its entirety. I had forgotten all about it until your comment. Now I recall I could barely understand it and did not enjoy one bit of it, though I loved — and still do — the German language.
I read Gantenbein in Russian translation under the title «Назову себя Гантенбайн» (I will call myself Gantenbein).
“Let my name be Gantenbein”
That would be great as a translation of a sentence in running prose, but I don’t think it works as a title.
How about, “I’ll Go by Gantenbein”.