The Lamentations of Zeno

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With The Lamentations of Zeno, Ilija Trojanow charts new territory in prose as well as geography. Not a native speaker of German, he has adopted that language and adapted it to his own purposes, taking full advantage of its lexical fecundity, creating words at will, and of its suspended syntax, with which he unleashes whole currents of consciousness. Alternating painterly descriptions of the natural world with cacophonic passages composed of song snippets, adspeak and “breaking news,” he contrasts the majestic stillness of the Antarctic with the clamor of human “civilization.” And all of this is framed within a confessional log that allows the reader to reconstruct the emotional course of the troubled protagonist.

The sheer range of registers is impressive — and quite a challenge for the translator. The title itself is a case in point: A literal “IceThaw” not only lacks the “aura” of the original EisTau, it also fails to convey the layers of meaning lurking in the German. “Melting Ice” seemed a bit lackluster, while “Meltdown” was more appropriate for any number of TV movies. Instead we decided to focus on the narrator who is the soul of the novel.

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