László Krasznahorkai*: And Seiobo descended to Earth

The Hunter of the Kamo River

T

everything moves around you like if only for once Heraclitus' message had reached there, overcoming all the obstacles it encountered along the way, carried by a deep current from an immeasurable distance, because water moves, flows, comes and goes, the wind stirs in its silk, the mountains sway in the dog days, and the heat in the landscape also trembles and vibrates, just like the small islands covered with tall grass and scattered along the riverbed, and each of the small waves that stumble as they rush over the low dike, and the same with each of the elusive and fleeting particles of these waves that pass like an exhalation, and each ray of light that ignites in the mantle of the transient elements, as well as the luminous drops, impossible to grasp in words, sparkling and scattered that appear on the surface and disintegrate instantly, the swirling clouds, the nervous and trembling blue sky above, the sun, whose radiant and blinding presence, concentrated in an immense and indescribable force, extends shining with frenzy to all creation of the moment, the fish and frogs and insects and small reptiles in the river and the cars that progress relentlessly along the smoking asphalt of the streets laid out parallel to the banks, the buses that could be those of line 3 in the north, or those of line 32 or those of 38, then the fast bicycles that move beneath the wide embankments, the men and women who walk along the riverbank on paths opened or barely hinted at in the dust, and also the blocks of stone placed artificially and asymmetrically beneath the flowing mass of water to slow it down, all of this appears or experiences that something is happening to it, that it elapses and advances and walks and sinks and rises and disappears and reappears and runs and flows and slips away somewhere, but not he, he does not move at all, the ooshirosagi, snowy and enormous bird, hunter who does not even hide his vulnerability, who could be attacked at will by anyone, he leans forward, tenses and stretches his neck, which he had bent in the shape of an S, and also stretches his head in the same line while pressing his wings against his body, he rests his thin legs on specific points underwater, he fixes his gaze on the surface of the fleeting current, on the surface, yes, at the same time that, as the light refracts, he sees with absolute clarity everything that is happening down there, no matter how fast it comes, he realizes that something is coming, that something is going to end up there, that a fish, a frog, an insect or a tiny reptile is coming with the water that sometimes slows down a little and then foams up, and then he will rush at his prey with a quick and precise movement of his beak and lift it up, you will not see exactly what, because everything will happen with the speed of lightning, in such a way that you will not be able to see, although you will know, that it is a fish, a feint, an ayu, a a, of a kamotsuka, a mugitsuku, an unagi or some other fish, that is why it has stopped there almost in the very middle of the shallow waters of the Kamo River and that is why it remains there in a time whose passage cannot be measured but which exists without the slightest doubt, in a time that goes neither forwards nor backwards, but is a kind of whirlpool that advances nowhere, cast there like a most complex net, and the immobility of the hunter must be born and maintained against a force so enormous that it could only be grasped in its simultaneity, but it is precisely this, the grasping of everything simultaneously, that is impossible, so that it remains ineffable, it is not captured by words thought up individually to describe it nor by all the words together, and yet he has to lean on a single instant at a time and thus hinder all movement and remain alone, by himself, in the midst of the madness of events, in the midst of a noisy and agitated world, in that instant stretched out like a a net which then closes and encloses him, that is to say, he has to stop his snowy body in the very centre of the frantic movement and oppose its immobility to the gigantic force which is throwing itself upon him from all sides, although much later it will happen, much later it will happen that he will once again participate in the total madness of the frantic movement and then he too will move, like everything else, striking with the speed of lightning, but for the moment he is only in the instant that closes around him, he is at the beginning of the hunt.

He comes from a world where eternal hunger reigns, and therefore the fact that he hunts means that he participates in the generalized, endless hunt, since every living being around him stalks its prescribed prey like the subject of an endless hunt, stalks it and pounces on it, approaches and seizes it, grabs it by the neck, breaks its spine or snaps its back in two, grazes it, absorbs it, swallows it, pierces it to suck it, gnaws it, bites it, devours it whole, and so on. He is therefore in the unfathomable hunt, he is obliged to the goal of hunting, because it is the only way to obtain food in this eternal hunger and therefore in this universal and obligatory hunt that extends to everything and yet, in his exclusive and individual case, has a certain richer meaning when he goes and takes his place, that is, when he puts his feet in the water and gets ready, so to speak, a richer meaning even than the hunt itself. word suggests, so that we can well quote the famous tercet of Al-Zahad ibn Shabih: “A bird flies home in the sky. / It looks tired. It has had a hard day. / It comes from a hunt: they were hunting him,” and add a more complex nuance and vary it in the sense that, although it had an immediate object, it did not have a more distant one, in the sense that it exists in a space where any more distant goal and more distant cause are impossible and, on the other hand, the fabric of objectives and immediate causes, in which it once arose and in which it will later have to disappear, is all the denser.

His only natural enemy, however, man, a being banished under the daily spell of Evil and Laziness, pays no attention to him there on the riverbank while he walks, runs, or cycles to or from his home along the paths drawn on both banks of the riverbed, or while he sits on a bench and takes advantage of the midday break to eat his rice triangle called nigiri, wrapped in seaweed and bought at the nearest 7-Eleven, not now, not today, maybe he will pay attention to him tomorrow or the day after, when there is some reason for it, but if there were people looking at him, he would not pay much attention, he has already grown accustomed to his presence there on the riverbank, just as people have grown accustomed to that large-bodied bird perched in the middle of the shallow water, but today this is not what happens, no one notices the other, although someone could witness that he is there, in that current that for much of its course does not reach above the knees, that is, a river of shallow depth dotted with islands of grass and in fact quite peculiar if not the strangest on the globe, right in the middle of the Kamo River and he remains completely motionless, his body strained forward, awaiting the day's plunder, for minutes and minutes that feel astonishingly long and soon become 10 and then 30, because in that waiting and attention and immobility time drags on incredibly, and he still doesn't move, he remains exactly the same, in the same attitude, not a feather moves, there he is, leaning forward, his beak at an acute angle to the surface of the flowing water, no one is looking at him, no one sees him, and if not today then never will be for all eternity, the ineffable beauty of his posture remains hidden, the extraordinary spell of his regal immobility remains imperceptible, so that the fact that there, in the middle of the Kamo River, in that immobility, in that snowy tension, is hidden and imperceptible lose before appearing, before there are no witnesses to the discovery that it is he who gives meaning to everything around him, who gives meaning to the world that turns and turns with a vertiginous movement, to the arid dog days, to the vibrations, to the mixture of voices, smells and images, because he is an exceptional case in that landscape, he is its irrefutable artist, the artist who, with the unparalleled aesthetics of perfect immobility, rises as the artistic culmination of still fixity above everything to which he otherwise gives meaning, rises, elevates himself from the mad parade of his environment and introduces something like an absence of objective – the fact of being, moreover, beautiful – above the concrete meaning that permeates everything, above even the concrete meaning of his own current activity, for what is he beautiful for besides being a simple white bird that remains waiting in the current of the Kamo River in Kyoto, waiting for something to finally appear from beneath the surface of the water, something that it will then mercilessly harpoon with its precise beak and its requires will.

László's musical writing

Last December, the newly minted Nobel Prize winner for Literature told La Jornada: "Making music means the same to me as writing." He added: "I improvise from the beginning with different instruments, and if you consider the two sides of the sources of my style, you'll understand the story behind that way of writing."

With permission from Acantilado publishing house, we publish this excerpt from his novel And Seiobo Descended to Earth, where the music that László Krasznahorkai writes with words is evident.

It's only fair to highlight the extraordinary work of the translator, Adan Kovacsis, born in Chile of Hungarian descent, trained in Vienna, and living in Frankfurt, who sustains the sonorous rhythm of Krasznahorkai's masterpiece. Side note: László was first known in English. His translator, the poet George Szirtes, describes his prose as "a slow, flowing lava."