Eileen Chang made it to 74. Woolf, 59. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 72. Wisława Szymborska, 88. Naguib Mahfouz managed 94 (a good innings). Baldwin, 68. Patrick White, 78. Soseki, 49. Cao Xueqin was about 40 or 50; the records vary. Beckett reached 83 – JM Coetzee’s current age. And Imre Kertész, brilliant, embattled – by Parkinson’s, by depression – lived to see 86.
To conceive of death’s apparition – of a death haunting – is to participate in it: sometimes vicariously, sometimes directly. Coetzee, we must assume – no more nor less than any of us – does not know how, or when, the end may arrive. But if The Pole and Other Stories were his final work, it would be astonishing – and no less so for comprising an 18-year span, the latest addition to a career that now extends over nearly half a century.
The earliest of these stories appeared in 2004; the latest arrived last year, not in English but in Spanish, as El Polaco. Indeed, four of the six stories collected here were written in English by Coetzee, but published first in Italian or Spanish. Coetzee has long championed languages outside the global anglosphere; regrettably his Italian translator Maria Baiocchi and Spanish translators Mariana Dimópulos and Elena Marengo are not named as translators in the collection’s acknowledgments, although the publications where the stories appeared are. (The publication of Wen Min’s Chinese translation of The Old Woman and the Cats in 2017 precedes its appearance in Spanish but is also unacknowledged.) This is unfortunate, considering the gendered labour involved, the double meaning and resonance of the collection’s title in English – with its echo of metropole and periphery – but especially as Coetzee has acknowledged that Dimópulos, who translated The Pole into Spanish, helped inform the character of Beatriz, the story’s delightfully bracing female lead.
It has been suggested Coetzee’s writing, which has often first appeared in languages other than English, can feel “like translations into Spanish of an English representing Spanish”. The idea of originals that feel like translations and translations that feel like originals is a ticklish one, perhaps not least for Coetzee, who once translated into English a Dutch translation of Cees Nooteboom’s Dutch translation of an English translation of a Danish story written by Søren Kierkegaard for McSweeney’s.
The collection’s elegiac, eponymous opening novella is a tale of translingual seduction, concerning Witold, a 72-year-old Polish pianist and noted but retiring Chopin interpreter (note, too, the glancing reference to musical translation) and his relationship with Beatriz, a married Catalan woman assisting him during his stay in Barcelona. It opens enigmatically: “The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.” Who is “him”? Is it Coetzee, shirtsleeves tugged at by his two characters lobbying for life, for the animation fiction grants?
Perhaps it is a kind of third voice or doubling, like the text that lies invisibly inside all acts of translation; or the fact Beatriz and Witold communicate with one another in a third language – English – until he dies, leaving behind a suite of poems. Each leads the other on – to revelations, misgivings, curiosities and uncertainties – becoming, in the process, their collaborator and accompanist, their significant other. Beatriz’s own triangle comprises her, her acts of self-communion and Witold. Or perhaps: herself, Witold as he lived, and finally his afterlife, each in dialogue with the other. When Beatriz writes to Witold after his death – having translated his final poems into Spanish from Polish so that she might interpret them – the result is a magnificent final chapter dialogue (and poignant concluding line) in which both characters, in a sense, are granted the final say.
Between the opening novella and the collection’s tail end – a (short) short story titled The Dog – we encounter Elizabeth Costello, a recurring figure in Coetzee’s fiction. Beginning with one of the loose strands of his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello – in which Costello, a novelist living in Melbourne, is said to be planning a visit to her daughter in Nice – we learn she now resides in a Catalan village, engaging, as ever, in Socratic dialogues with her son and daughter about animals and more-than-human kinship.
Another immanent kinship preoccupies her: old age. Her son is troubled by it; what once seemed solely to require the participation of others now demands hers. Costello invokes “words I once upon a time used to hear from old people and swore I would never say myself: What is the world coming to! for example”. What the world is coming to, always and irrevocably, is the end of our role in it: in Hope, one of the four connected Costello pieces, she readies herself for final things, seeking, through voluntary euthanasia, to avoid dementia.
In The Old Woman and the Cats – which evinces a vein of humour not always appreciated or adverted to in Coetzee’s work – we meet an intellectually disabled man named Pablo whom Costello looks after, demonstrating how other forms of affinity and bonding, extensions of kinship and familiarity, can enter a life.
The Pole and Other Stories’ narratives are dense with such communions: with interlocutors and love triangles, processes of philosophical reflection and undoing that demand duos and trios, the collaboration of others; one recalls 2007’s Diary of a Bad Year, whose initial twinned narration soon divides – literally – into three parts.
Costello’s interest in Socratic dialogue and the more-than-human – “living in the company of beings whose mode of being is unlike mine, more unlike mine than my human intellect will ever be able to grasp” – informs much of the collection’s concern with death. And death itself is such a being – an ungraspable – or perhaps not a being, exactly, but an event; one that is always imperceptibly asserting itself.
In The Glass Abattoir, Costello tells her son a story about Heidegger, a story recalling John Donne’s enlisting of a flea to seduce a lover (the animal combining the blood of lover and beloved). The flea doubles as a representative of Heidegger’s animal nature, of the appetites that precede and overtake reason – a form of cognition which, Costello suggests, we ultimately hope to dissolve, to be called back from. Costello’s wish to communicate with Heidegger about what it might mean to no longer be present in the world recalls Beatriz’s desire for similar impossibilities, to continue speaking with Witold after his passing.
Literature, especially great literature – and Coetzee’s surely is – tends to abet, to mitigate life’s little mistakes and failings. That, in part, is its job, its modus operandi: to sustain, to recover, to emancipate; to give succour while everything remains possible. In The Pole and Other Stories, Coetzee revisits his perennial themes: animal kinship, ontological questions (of life, love and death) and the nature of desire – desire to understand the other, to comprehend and be in communion with “that which is beyond us”. Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness – a sense of how the past occupies us until, one day, we come to occupy it.
The Pole and Other Stories is out in Australia now (Text, $34.99) and will be published in the UK on 19 October (Harvill Secker, £20).
