Post 8: The Tree-Man Looks Back
14 April 2025/ Pages 220-251Our protagonist is hopeless ordering a combinatorically infinite alphabet, consumed as 666 fruits in a specific time and order in the pit of hell, supervised by the now-chimera Ruprecht. The weird thing is, I’ve been to this hell before. I recognize it. It’s the third panel of Bosch’s altarpiece of The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado. The narrator is the Tree-Man, looking back, beset and inhabited in his innards by devils. He’s been translated maybe, or transposed. The Tree-Man is an oddly sympathetic figure in a scene of supposedly-deserved Biblical suffering. He looks at the viewer, his gaze meets your gaze directly, profoundly human despite his bodily form; it is the biggest mournful face in the dark coiling world of the panel.
Lentz must know that anyone who knows Bosch will see this passage, jokes even: “…. If the devil is a bad painter, as one says, thus he must also be a bad poet.” The narrator eats the encoded alphabetic fruits as he is ordered to read and transcribe the book of life. He looks back at the cathedral clock in the Cologne of his childhood. He looks back at us, the readers. The Tree-Man also looks back in another sketch of Bosch’s, one where he isn’t in so obviously in hell. His expression is the same, beset by magpies and an owl, in Bosch’s argot, the spectre of the surveillance state. His flag is not the stomach-bagpipe of the hell panel yet, but a crescent moon. I wonder if Lentz thinks about this drawing, of Tree-Man in the world, the same gaze, but a different place.
So much of Schattenfroh is a self-reflexive looking back like this. The dramas of the narrator’s childhood, inscribed forward again into the metaphysical broader narrative, the way the book references itself, the way the language the book is translated from is always implicit in its conviction that this is an unstable meaning, configured by, and also configuring, the world. When the narrator suddenly shifts, “… sitting on a stone in a flowing pink robe that drapes its robes into seven neat tiers,” he’s in another Bosch, this time as St. John of Patmos, witnessing the future apocalypse again. He wonders as he witnesses:
“How can I be sure the angel is translating correctly and not acting in an unauthorized fashion?”
He can’t. I could check this text against the German edition but even if I did, what would it mean for me to disagree with the words Max Lawton and Matthias Friedrich chose to render it as for me? When I read German I’m already doing it as a second-order exercise, translating into my own English in my head. I had a dream in German only once, when I was a summer researcher in Wolfenbüttel as a graduate student, a tiny town outside Braunschweig where I didn’t speak English for months. Maybe if I had read Schattenfroh then in the original, it would be less once-removed. As it is I’m the Tree-Man too, looking back at you with the usual agony to say, “this is how it is” . It is always a little reflexive dance of approximations, literature in translation. Maybe I’m a masochist for loving it, loving the pain of doubt especially when it’s a language I can’t read at all, like Russian or Turkish. Look at me, looking at you, doubting! Look at us, pair of question-mirrors.
Lucifer orders our narrator to write the Book of Life, or transcribe or translate it, depending on how you see things. Apparently, the letters can’t be too smooth, “… the voice needs granules, God must get stuck on the letters if I call him… for this each text has only this goal for me—to bring God down.” Lucifer, who is Schattenfroh, who is also sometimes Father, is also all of us reading, bringing God down into the pages for inspection. We are running him through a series of dictionaries and proofreadings in at least two languages. Is this “the wound that will not heal”, the precise imprecision of letters? Do we love the wound like the faithful kissed the images of the Arma Christi, the five wounds of Christ, so many times on medieval vellum that we can still see the kisses now in the holdings of manuscript libraries?
If I could call God down, by the way, wearing pink robes that smell as much of burning bagel as this inside out black t-shirt does now, I would ask why I was not a dead German. Why I was condemned to write in English now, even though I am forever also condemned to the editorial observation that my English is “too European,” and not from an era when people would be expected to know things, or at least look them up. I would ask why Michael Lentz is allowed to assume his reader knows Bosch but I’m not and honestly, I think I would make my letters nice and rough and get mad at God here, call him down kicking and screaming with consonants. What if literature in English was allowed to be as generally daring and erudite as literature in translation? Is this my punishment for something? God, who must also be omniscent about publishing, has to answer for this. Anyway, I already got kicked out of paradise when I was not born into a language that allowed me to easily compound my own sensible nouns! And now look, I kiss the wound, I look back at you like the narrator, like Tree-Man, and I ask you to reflect on me reflecting.
There’s a Magnetic Fields’ song that has a line “The book of love is long and boring/No one can lift the damn thing.” Maybe that’s true, of my love, of this book, of all the long books I read in translation, of why I read them. Maybe Michael Lentz has shown me something about myself, and will ask if it’s true of you too. I love to kiss the wound. I will always look back.
-- A.V. Marraccini
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