Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 3, December 2014
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Sonnevi, Göran. Mozart’s Third Brain. Trans. Rika Lesser. London: Yale University Press, 2009. 200pp. Price: 20 pounds.
A Song for Infinity
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpu
We have ceased to believe in Grand Narratives with a vengeance. Not only do we disbelieve in sagas and epic poems but we have to convert them to comic books and graphic novels before we can accept them unabashedly today. In this contemporary scenario Göran Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain stands out like a blooming tree in a desert. It is the woolly mammoth among literary genres – it is a long poem divided into over one hundred sections. However it is only the form that is past; the contents are very present and very relevant for our troubled times. Mozart’s Third Brain is the thirteenth book of verse from Göran Sonnevi who is a well known poet in Swedish. He has won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2006 and is the most important Swedish poet besides Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. The poem written originally in Swedish has been translated into English by Rika Lesser.
According to Rosanna Warren who has written the foreword, this “is a massive poem that breaks almost every poetic convention” and is a difficult read even for the most dedicated reader. The long poem, divided into 144 discrete shorter poems, deals with a range of topics ranging from the philosophically abstruse: “only if I dare go deeper / What is deeper?/ That I can find out only by going deeper / The answer to Pilate’s question” (Section XV)to the politics of the here and now: “I speak with a close friend He imagines Europe,/the European Union, as a real peace project,/as a real project for freedom and democracy—And if it is?” (Section LXXXIII). It is obvious that Sonnevi is disturbed by those questions which are of perennial interest to humanity at large, like the meaning of life and death or the purpose of our existence. He is also equally if not more disturbed by the senseless and repetitive cycle of violence perpetrated by humanity against itself, the likes of which are proliferating around us day by day in Bosnia, Somalia, Syria or Afghanistan. It is this intrinsic humanitarianism of Sonnevi rather than the cerebral logic which appeals to his reader. For instance the tortured question: “Why do people die? Civil / wars on ethnic or religious grounds, rising up out of the / past?” (Section XIV) is followed by a discussion of present day atrocities which have ceased to have any shock value because of their repetitive nature.
Along with this domain of the public and the universal is the quiet and reclusive personal domain where he seeks answers to a quest of his private consciousness. This is where music plays, “with its whirling numeric relations”, connecting him with the natural world. A major part of the world as we know it now has to be broken down to be reshaped into a new form. Living in a world that is being reshaped, using a language that is “shattered”, he states: “That’s where the given is broken and new form becomes possible” (LXVI). We find a link to the title here, the ‘third brain’ of Mozart. Rosanna Warren explicates the rather puzzling title, that it seems to “pertain to the left brain-right brain thesis, with a further notion of a transcendent “third” mode of cognition to which music give access…” (xii). It is in this synthetic third space where binaries dissolve that the hope for the future lies, transcending spatio-temporal boundaries and pointing towards infinity. As the last poem states: “Infinity sings We don’t hear it It does not exist / It sings its lullaby For us For us/ We sing for infinity” (CXLIV).
The translation of such a work is difficult, if not formidable. Rika Lesser notes in her foreword: “As reader, writer, and translator, I am ecstatic when I disappear into a literary text…” (xvi) but goes on to warn that “the product of the act of translation is never the work of a single author, and this fact should never go unacknowledged” (xvii). Her translation has excelled in submerging the translator’s self in the author’s and what we have is a beautiful rhapsody where the two voices have blended seamlessly. The translator also has to be an ideal reader and Lesser confesses that she cannot claim a complete understanding of the text she translates.
In fact, this is a confession which most readers would have. The poem is like an elaborate riddle which demands the patience and dedication of a committed reader. T S Eliot commenting upon Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in his 1939 Frontiers of Criticism, wrote: “one book like this is enough.” I was reminded of this comment when I was going through Goran Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain.