April 2nd: Jeanne Bonner
5:06 a.m.
Last night, as we did the Wordle, Leo plugged in “merda” – a bad word in Italian – and then plugged in “merde,” (the same bad word in French), essentially showing off he can curse in multiple languages. I sometimes think of how my parents would have reacted had I pulled some of the same antics! It seems to make no impression on Leo when I tell him the age I was when my mother heard me say the “F” word for the first time! Put it this way: I myself was already a mom. (So, not 12 years old, like him!)
I am so close to finishing One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World and as with all books that I love, I am slow-walking the final pages. I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to let Stella Levi – a 101-year-old Holocaust survivor from a vanished Jewish community on the Greek island of Rhodes – slip away.
I read until about 11 p.m. last night, which was a little unusual.
In other news: I am still in the business of inventing game time after school. Yesterday, Leo and I played cards, then a few rounds of bocce in the backyard, followed by ping pong in the basement. If I have the energy and do not have any writing or translation work to do, I am happy if I can give a little structure and a little whimsy to our time together. Lord knows, he watches enough TV!
We’ve been playing cards a lot lately – ever since he went to a friend’s house and played with his grandparents. We play Rummy, though he keeps the poker chips handy and has us wager with chips on each hand we play. Do I need to tell you he wins most of the time? The boy is crazy about games. During the pandemic lockdown, he would wander out into the yard and within a few minutes invent a new game for us to play. One involved blowing bubbles and awarding points based on the size of the bubbles, as I recall.
I suppose I was ready to relax by the time Leo returned from school because I’d spent the morning puzzling through the requirements for all of the readings I’ve lined up. In 20 days, my translation will be officially published, though it’s already available from the publisher. In 20 days, I hope the title, This Darkness Will Never End, finds its way onto people’s lips and into book reviews. But who can say? The work was its own reward. I don’t regret all the time I spent translating Edith Bruck’s book, I don’t regret all the effort I’ve made to immerse myself in her work or the work of other Holocaust survivors.
I do worry a bit about juggling all of these readings I’ve arranged! I will need to block off big chunks of time to drive all the way to Philadelphia and Boston, for example. But I also delight in the chance to speak about a project I began in 2018, and the chance to share a bit of what I learned during the fellowship at the New York Public Library to study books about women survivors. I also love the idea that I can use some of my favorite lines from the translation to convince my audience to take this journey with me. Say, “She was the age I’d been when I lost everyone and everything.” I know exactly how intoxicating words can be!
It's stunning how much sleep affects my mood. The right amount of sleep – at the right time – has the power to unleash an almost uncontrollable amount of hope. On my mind: The manufacture of hope. It’s on my mind today and so many days. I’m subject to the whims of this manufacturing process, which sometimes depends on me entirely, while other times it churns into action seemingly without my input.
I’m always outrunning something – or rather I have the sensation that I am. Outrunning whatever it is that will vanquish hope. It’s not complete desperation; rather the image I have is of my person moving rapidly away from something while clumsily but earnestly trying to repair, revive, revise. There’s both hope and failure in the image – this moving picture in my head of someone – me – doggedly trying to improve but aware of all that’s ranged against me.
Also aware at other moments that my attitude truly transforms my reality. It can disfigure circumstances into something horrific or manipulate the same set of facts into a hopeful possibility.
When I am hopeful, I am aware that nothing in life is black and white.
When I am not hopeful, I am aware of how bleak life can be.
*
Leo likes to say to Caramel, “Get your furry butt over here.”
Every morning, Leo and Caramel spoon on the couch before school. Who can say what a dog might be thinking but when her furry face peeks out from under the blankets permanently stashed on the couch, you can see such a look of contentedness! This morning, as they spooned, I wondered if Caramel realizes Leo isn’t a dog.
As I’m writing this journal entry, I think about how much I relish an “assignment” like this. Keep a journal for a day? Don’t mind if I do! Make it a week, a month, a year! How about a lifetime? I realized recently that if someone asked me about a guilty pleasure, one potential answer would be: re-reading my journals. Guilty in as much as it’s self-centered. I am enthralled by rediscovering past thought!
The journaling habit has spawned lots of sub-journals. For example, the car journal, the walking journal, the sleep journal. Also, the fiction journal – for scraps of ideas that involve fictional plots. On this day a few years ago, I scrawled this idea in the fiction journal: “Parking garages with elevators. Must work these monstrosities into a short story. You take an elevator down from a level of the parking garage to the lobby of the building just to be able to take an elevator up to your actual destination.”
Small joy: photocopying the text of a short Italian poem I want to translate and stapling it into my journal so that I can have the original on one side of the notebook, facing my attempt to render it in English on the other page.
Piano lesson for Leo today. Yesterday I prevailed upon him to play the piano for a few minutes. It’s so beautiful when he does. He played something from the opera, “Carmen.” The atmosphere of the house is transformed.
The house, which is cluttered with half-read newspapers and saved articles, or should I say even more than usual? So much urgent news to read in these unusual times! It’s also littered with post-it notes, and yes, I mean even more than usual. Right now, there are multiple notes about cashing the “Grumman check.”
I suspect I enjoy reading it – and writing the note – because then I get to say (or think) “Grumman.” The mere mention conjures up my father who had worked at Grumman as part of the engineering team that served the Apollo space mission team. Grumman. A word – a name – that was uttered so often during my childhood, then slowly faded. My father went on to work for a government laboratory for the bulk of his career. But then due to an accounting error connected to pension payments, it’s resurrected (as an errand) and next thing you know, I am walking down Memory Lane (one of my preferred routes), thinking about my father and the long shadow cast on me that death cannot undo. I suppose at some point these chance remembrances will end? Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll go on finding reasons to think about some aspect of my parents’ lives forever. I certainly wouldn’t mind.
9:30 a.m.
I have learned that Ocean Vuong has a new book coming out and I am eager to read it. Is he the most famous writer coming out of Hartford? During a search for past Birthday Journal posts last month after my birthday, I found a comment he had made during an interview when he was asked about fusing poetic tendencies with prose:
“I am an apprentice of the sentence.”
I believe he said it to shrug off questions of genre. But I love it as a vocation. Who are you? Oh me? I am an apprentice of the sentence.
We will have to pick this up later! I’m on my way to Wesleyan. Today, no classes – just visiting the library and meeting a colleague for lunch.
3:37 p.m.
I have finished the book about Stella Levi, and like all good books it has left me feeling bereft, now that it’s over. When I looked back to see what I’d been reading a year ago, I found quotes in my paper journal from a book by Jean Amery:
“Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world … will not be regained.”
And:
“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him.”
The book is probably somewhere in the stacks at Wesleyan, which I visit almost anytime I visit . There will come a day when perhaps all of these books will completely recede in importance – the physical tomes, I mean – and I will be heartbroken. To linger among these shelves is sheer joy. Today I looked at books by Dacia Maraini and Natalia Ginzburg. Each has an entire shelf – fitting.
6:37 p.m.
Leo turned on the Mets game, and from the kitchen where I was preparing dinner, I could hear him gleefully announcing, “The Mets are losing!” He has learned that teasing can be quite fun – for him at least. And as for the Mets, well, he’s a Yankee fan! He is looking forward to a lifetime of teasing Mets fans.
Also, he’s apparently looking forward to beating me at cards again and again. In the space of two weeks, he’s become a card shark.
The week in reading:
One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (Michael Frank)
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt)
The Art of X-Ray Reading (Roy Peter Clark)
Absolution (Jeff Vandemeer)
Various books of essays by Natalia Ginzburg, including Vita immaginaria
The week in re-reading:
Amy Hempel’s short story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried”
9:42 p.m.
Tina sent a photo from another world – actually just another era. It was on a group chat and no one could pinpoint the year. Was it 2009? The place was Annapolis, Maryland, and the vibe? Youthful irreverence during a weekend lunch with friends I’ve known since high school. In the photo, my friends look great but I’m wearing some ridiculous get-up (ridiculous on me, at any rate) – a cropped tank top and a mini skirt, both of which look too tight, even back then. I was tired and wanted to go to bed but I was happy to add silly messages to the chat while also figuring out what I wanted to read now that my journey with One Hundred Saturdays was over. Actually it wasn’t over because as I often do, I simply started to re-read it. One small concession from the years piling up: you learn re-reading is savoring. Like remembering. And writing.
Jeanne Bonner is the translator of This Darkness Will Never End, a short story collection written in Italian by Hungarian-born writer Edith Bruck. She occasionally teaches writing at Wesleyan University.