More than a decade ago, I’ve read The Flounder (1977) by Günter Grass in both English and Spanish. It does not take long to realize that the translators departed from quite different cultural frameworks, as the English translation – perhaps because it was crafted under the pressure of publishing it as fast as possible[1] – seems to fall in easy solutions that transmit a crass, often vulgar, interpretation of the original text, which as it is rendered in Spanish appears more like an erudite work of literature. It was due to the reception of the first English translation of The Flounder what made Grass call for a meeting with English translators to craft a revised – and supervised by Grass himself – new version of The Flounder, a novel of more than six-hundred pages.
Another aspect that the first translation of The Flounder rendered, and that perhaps it may pass unnoticed to a male reader, is the overt symbolic violence that the translator seems to intentionally aim towards women. I myself became aware of this thanks to my first wife. We read The Flounder together, she did it in English, and I did it in Spanish. After the first hundred pages we decided to discuss the text, and it was evident that she was feeling quite exasperated with the reading. If memory doesn’t lie, she said something like: “this Günter Grass is a misogynist asshole.” I had been reading the award-winning translation of the Spaniard Miguel Sáenz and my first impressions were of literary amusement, but as we began to cite certain passages, it was clear that the translators had chosen quite different parameters to render what they wanted to transmit to the reader. Where the English translator labeled women as sluts or easy holes, the Spanish translator decided to invoke silence or omission, or simply create a new text. It would’ve been necessary, for a more philological discussion, to go to the original text in German to find out if the misogyny was indeed part of the novel or it was a creation of the English translator.
The novel is divided in nine chapters that altogether narrate a birth that takes place over a period of time that spans from the Neolithic and reaches up to the 20th century. It begins with the Pomeranian interpretation of the ancient myth of the stealing of the fire and it ends with a lesbian protest in Germany during the 1970s. As the novel unravels, the reader gets immersed in a carrousel of folk tales, historical gossip, and even deadly recipes, as the one of poisonous mushrooms made by an old nun to kill a group of lecherous clergymen. As it is the case of The Tin Drum (1959), the story recounted in The Flounder begins in the region where Grass was born, Gdansk, in modern-day Poland. Despite the fact that each chapter presents different characters anchored in the vicissitudes of their historical time, there is a recurrent presence that transits throughout the entire novel either as a tangible or symbolical character: a flounder, a one-sided fish, a type of fish that is abundant in cold waters like those of the Baltic sea and that along with potatoes makes the most traditional dish of the place where Grass was born.
As it is well illustrated in religious mythology, a fish is one of the most widespread Christian symbolical items, as it references the rite of conversion to Christianity thanks to the mediation of Jesus, a kind of fisherman who immerses himself in pagan waters with the sole intention to bring “a catch,” or spiritual strength, to the Christian army. Grass chooses a flounder to represent Christianity not only because of his moral one-sidedness, but also because this anatomical feature makes it a fish that mostly meanders in the bottom of shores with not much depth, which from a hermeneutical standpoint could be understood as the incarnation of a biased ethos that is only able to see one side of reality. Thus his cosmological understanding of history is based on that blurry one-sided vision.[2]
In the novel, most of the times the flounder is a sonic presence that spends his time whispering in the ears of men how to better proceed for the only sake of the preservation of the masculine vision of the world. When someone happens to see it, a mix of horror and awe takes over her/his senses, for seeing such a horrendous animal that talks through an uneven denture cannot invoke a different set of emotions. However, in most of the novel the fish is only a whisper that unleashes the worst of destinies to humanity with all the wars, unmotivated biological destructions, and social syndroms fueled by an unfulfilled masculinity. It is not surprising that the fish, and what it embodies and represents, becomes not only hated but also a call to reject the world in all its masculine materializations, particularly when we glance at humanity from a non-masculine perspective.
The closing chapter – that in which the gestation of postmodern history is finally born – brings to the reader’s attention the social and symbolical power of the German lesbian communities of the 1970s, which seen from the phallocentric power structures of the German state represent the end of a form of womanhood at the service of male desires and aspirations, including the realm of the family and the household’s economy. In the wake of the 21st century, a novel like The Flounder appears as a cultural artifact aiming at multiple directions. On the one hand, it narrates from a literary perspective the historical and sociological reasons to seek an absolute Revolution against “the flounder”; on the other hand, the ending of the novel seems to anticipate that the Future was going to become the stage of constant revolts, transforming the world into a place where manifold strategies of both revitalization and destruction were going to be deployed even from unimaginable fronts, such as the kitchen, our inner conversations/monologues, and hygienic biopolitical spaces.
Only once I’ve been in Gdansk, a small, ultra-clean port city that owns a statue of Neptune in the heart of the city. I travelled there to attend a life-changing event at The Retro Café (a spot where you can eat one of the most delicious chocolate cakes on Earth). Besides having a plate of fried flounder with boiled potatoes (which is traditionally served on a pan of cast iron), while walking along the Martwa Wisla river, as if neuroplasticity had already began to model reality, including us, I saw a man almost with the same physiognomy of Günter Grass staring at me. When our eyes exchanged a serious expression, he looked at the gray waters of the river, as if he was indeed a messenger from The Flounder’s author, a gesture that today I interpret as the fact that the flounder’s body, perhaps lifeless, is still drowning in those waters on his way to the ocean.
[1] The first English translation of The Flounder was published in 1978, one year after it was released in German.
[2] In a way, “a Christian flounder” is a veiled reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the vision is precluded only to the shadows casted over the rocky walls of a cold cave, becoming impossible to glimpse the slightest atom of the truth that reality could potentially contain.
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