ALT note
Lars Gustafsson, a poet, writer and novelist, is one of Sweden's most respected intellectuals. He retired in 2006 after 20 years as a professor of philosophy and creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin. During that time he wrote three novels situated in Austin and nearby, of which only one* has been published in English language translation.
While studying in Sweden in the summer of 2010, at the bookstore of the University of Uppsala I came across the third of these novels, Dekanen, in Swedish (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Natur och Kultur, 2005). Prof. Gustafsson kindly agreed to allow me to translate this powerful, enigmatic novel last year. When I recently contacted him and his agent about submitting the translation for a competition and publishing excerpts at AustinLiveTheatre.com, I received an immediate response from him via his I-phone: "Okay by me!" I've confirmed that accord both with him and with his literary agent, Carl Hanser Verlag of Munich.
Below is the opening chapter of The Dean, © Lars Gustafsson, 2003, in a translation by Michael Meigs (© 2010). This and subsequent excerpts will be accompanied by images taken by me or used under license by GNU, Creative Commons, or other similar sharing arrangements.
*(The Tale of a Dog: from the Diaries and Letters of a Texan Bankruptcy Judge, translated by Tom Geddes, 1993 [New York: New Directions Publishing])
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Professor Gustafsson writes in his preface to this novel, "During my two decades at the University of Texas at Austin I served under five very different deans. All of them were strong personalities. Most of them actually became my friends. The most original in any case was Bob King. Among his many decisions was that to appoint me as a professor without actually asking anyone for permission. Even so, I cannot assert that any of my deans has served as the model for the principal figure in this novel." -- L.G. February 1, 2003
The Dean
From papers left behind by Spencer C. Spencer
Collected and published by Dr. Elizabeth Ney,
Librarian for the Humanities Research Center
The University of Texas at Austin
[Maverick Mountain, near Terlingua (image: Gregory M. Genovese) (Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0)]
1. One World, Seen from Another
Time passes. There’s no denying it: time goes by.
I have now lived here, just at the edge of the desert outside Study Butte, for several weeks. I don’t know exactly how many. I’ve been too involved in more important things, and I’ve noticed that the motel owner, that painter of fine art and artist in alcoholism Mr. Archibald Primrose, has started to look a little puzzled.
He wonders whether I’m taking my assignment seriously enough. He doesn’t think that my expeditions out into this moonscape are long enough for a real university geologist. If I’m a geologist at all.
To keep up appearances I have told him that my work just now happens to be in a theoretical phase. I am trying to work out an algorithm or, strictly speaking, an integral, for the sine waves that created the Chisos Mountains. Thank God that at breakfast this morning, which was outstanding (thanks to his wife), he was subjected to several more detailed inquiries from another guest.
It would of course be unfortunate if some morning a real professor of geology from the University of Texas should turn up with a busload of Ph.D. students and assistants. That would pose a real challenge for my powers of invention.
This morning Mr. Primrose was satisfied with the idea of positing sine waves and the prospect of reproducing them with a higher integral equation. But he asked, in the same breath, for the next two weeks’ rent and for an additional week’s payment as a deposit. Does he suspect something or is he really that short of cash?
For a number of technical reasons that I do not care to discuss, I’m not using my Visa card or my MasterCard for the moment. I have a thick sheaf of banknotes with me, instead. I cleaned out my not too well stocked bank account on that same hectic afternoon.
What hectic afternoon?, you ask.
That afternoon. The one when I decided to leave the issues behind me. When I left Austin. When I took things into my own hands. When I took the bull by the horns.
So Mr. Primrose got his rent in cash. That’s a little unusual these days. But even my innkeeper considered it the best way to proceed. He didn’t complain. He didn’t even look surprised. Perhaps that’s common out here, right at the edge of the desert? Maybe in fact he’s used to having guests like me? No, that’s not so. Almost all are tourists, mostly elderly couples, retirees who are out to visit, before they die, the more exclusive, the freer, the more barren and more extensive parts of the continent in which they have spent their working lives in offices and workshops. I am without doubt the only one of my type. I told him that I’ll be staying for a while longer. Mr. Primrose made no comment.
I wonder if he really believes my geological explanations of my activities here or if he’s just pretending.
My academic specialty was the so-called New Age of Philosophy. Beginning with Descartes, in other words. My Ph.D. thesis dealt with Condillac. Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. I was an early student of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, its atheists and its libertines. That seemed to me an appropriate compromise between the ancients and the most recent modern philosophers, who held no attraction for me, either because of their pedantic refusal to deal with questions of morals and politics, as, for example, the Anglo Saxon empiricists, or because of their totally incomprehensible approaches, as for example, in Sartre, Deleuze, Derrida and the others, whoever they may be.
So, yes, was there any real reason for a pale, thin, red-haired fellow like Dr. Spencer to be spending those weeks in this little desert inn?
Mr. Primrose appears, from the fairly random remarks he’s in the habit of making while serving breakfast (in sloppy fashion and without noticing how much coffee he inevitably spills on the table covering, which anyway is made of cheap resistant plastic), to have been some sort of artist in the San Francisco bay area. He seems to have difficulty remembering exactly where that was. One day he says Fisherman’s Wharf and the next day he says “San Salito,” but perhaps those are the same place. I wonder. Just where they are. And of course, one can wonder how he wound up here. Here in the vast emptiness. Under the bad moon of the Comanche and the coyotes.
It’s not so easy. To write it all down. That’s not my profession. But if you will just be patient, you at least potential witnesses who someday perhaps will find these papers that I’m piling up day after day in a drawer at the very bottom of the old camphor-perfumed desk, I will tell you what I can.
But not everything can be written down. That’s for sure.
(to be continued)
© Lars Gustafsson, 2003, in a translation by Michael Meigs (© 2010)
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