The Music of Silence | An Interview with Luis Sagasti
Interviews
By Fionn Petch
Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering, which has just been released in the U.S. by Charco Press (in my translation) opens with an account of the genesis of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It reimagines the work as an extravagant musical sleeping pill for an insomniac aristocrat whose valet, frustrated that the pianist stops playing when his client begins to snore, hatches a plan that will allow him to hear more of the Variations. A counterpoint is then summoned in the shape of Scheherazade, who, to save her life, must tell stories to keep her captor awake and wanting more the next night. Perhaps inspired by her example, Sagasti proceeds to move lightly and deftly from tale to tale, told in fragmentary and interwoven form, seducing the reader as he forges thematic connections between a dazzling and diverse range of subjects. He leads us from Glenn Gould to the Beatles; from the music of outer space to Australian Aboriginal instruments; from Native American sand paintings to Rothko and Jackson Pollock; from the music played and composed in concentration camps to a music made of silence. Over seven chapters that place these characters and events, both historical and fictional, in groupings harmonic as well as dissonant, Sagasti frequently circles back to the points of intersection among them all—recurrent motifs and tropes in the expanding ripples of significance. Gradually, a pattern emerges from this mosaic that attests, among other things, to the importance of music and art to our moments of crisis and extreme emotion, elation and abjection alike.
A Musical Offering is my second translation of Luis Sagasti, after Fireflies (Charco Press, 2019). It was first published in the United Kingdom in 2020, where it was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021. For the U.S. release, I took the opportunity to ask Sagasti some questions about his work.
Fionn Petch: I feel that A Musical Offering could be described—correct me if I’m wrong—as above all a book about the pauses in music, and about what happens when the music stops. How do you address a theme like silence through writing?
Luis Sagasti: I think we need to differentiate between silence and what is silent. By silence I refer to the pauses, rests, brief truces in the narration. That’s where the text collects itself—in my writing, this is achieved by the separation of the paragraphs, the use of brief sentences followed by pauses—and makes it possible to reveal in some way what is silent. That is, the thing that escapes language: a certain kind of experience, for example. It’s in these silences that the text breathes; it is where it gets its oxygen from in order to maintain its internal rhythm, the musicality of each section.
I agree with what you say, but I’d add that I’m not only interested in what happens when the music stops but also the waiting room, the threshold: the silence before the music begins to play. After all, isn’t it fascinating, that moment before our favorite band begins playing, or that silence—now almost extinct—that opens up in the space between two songs on a record? There is an anticipation of the ear, a savoring of the song an instant before it unfolds in time. If I were a Buddhist, I’d say that’s how I imagine the soul before incarnation.
FP: When you are preparing to write a book of this kind, how do you proceed? Do you begin with the central idea or theme and research stories and characters you feel might be relevant to it? Or, on the contrary, do you gather anecdotes and references until an idea emerges that unifies them in some way?
LS: In general, I start out with what we might call a strong idea or, if you like, a kind of philosophical question, although it’s never very precise. This has included things like: conspiracy theories, the impossibility of conveying experiences, recursiveness, etc. Yes, I always have a number of stories in mind that I research. Naturally, the theme expands during this process. Lines of perspective also appear—details or stories new to me that might represent good narrative material. Then there are elements that are pure invention, too. There also appear, from time to time and almost involuntarily, certain thematic nuclei, something like tiny gravitational forces that lead me to establish connections between stories, events, biographies.
FP: This genre of novel—we could call it the novel of fascinating, obscurely connected facts—seems to be growing in popularity. Where do you place its origins and who are its great practitioners? Why has this mode of writing found resonance today?
LS: Yes, this narrative style of fragmentation, disruption, and juxtaposition does seem to be in fashion (though I don’t think it’s just a fashion). I think that quite simply it expresses a world that works this way, and even more so since the emergence of the Internet. At the same time, however, I’d dare to say that I personally work this way too. To the despair of my students, there’s not a great deal of difference between my way of teaching classes and my way of writing. By this I mean that I tend almost involuntarily to thread themes together, to establish links between apparently incompatible ideas. Of course, the results don’t always stand up.
I see forerunners to what I do in books like Don DeLillo’s Counterpoint and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, though the latter is clearly quite different too. I think Agustín Fernández Mallo and Benjamín Labatut are writers I share territory with. Nor should we forget David Markson or Olga Tokarczuk. All of these great writers I began to read after setting out on this path. That’s why I think we could say that this literary style is one that resonates with the current epoch and that many of us, without knowing each other, vibrate to the same chord. And perhaps in this sincerity—this lack of artificiality—some kind of longevity may be found.
FP: What does a book of this kind require to be successful in its own terms? To play devil’s advocate for a moment, how does the reading experience differ from, say, a day spent going down a rabbit hole of hyperlinks on Wikipedia? Is it one that is more demanding of the reader? One of the challenges of the translation process for me, for example, was working out how to maintain the delicate ambiguity of suggestion that takes place at the level of the sentence. You leave the reader to put things together for themselves. Also, from what I’ve heard, your students love your digressive approach to classroom teaching!
LS: I think it’s always better to suggest than to show, and to show rather than say. If we’re not careful, the love of words can lead us into redundancy or pretentiousness. I prefer the reader to forge their own connections. In any case, the ones I establish aren’t the only possible ones. People have often brought to my attention relationships between images and ideas in my books I’d never dreamed of, and they are often richer than the ones I’d suggested myself. At the same time, I think we have to differentiate between playful surfing of the waters of the web and consulting archives and sites to corroborate ideas, intuitions, and stories. From time to time, I might find on the Internet some piece of information, a curiosity that serves my narrative, but I don’t use it to go on fishing trips, to see what turns up. As for my classes, depending on the subject, I try to guide the kids so that they discover certain ideas for themselves. Other times, it’s simply a question of exposition.
FP: Another aspect of the book that demanded a lot of care as I translated was the humor. The book is shot through with a subtle—occasionally deadpan—wit that can easily be missed by the inattentive reader. Is this also intended to infuse lightness into some very dark material?
LS: Humor appears in my books in the sense of wonder and incredulity at certain events, such as the tale of the Brazilian priest who tied himself to a thousand balloons and disappeared into the sky (as recounted in Fireflies). But I always try to be compassionate, not to mock. But there’s no getting away from the fact that some things are just funny. And yes, I agree with you, it’s a strategy—often involuntary—to lighten themes or stories that can be grim or terrifying. In A Musical Offering, there is a whole chapter about a gigantic organ that has an air of poetic slapstick. And the story in the chapter ‘Silences’—which I believe actually happened—about Claudio Arrau and the Royal Orchestra in Holland (where the pianist and conductor are each waiting for the other to begin, not realizing they have prepared different pieces) has this kind of deadpan, almost Zen-like humor, in the style of Jacques Tati, which I really like. Outside of my novels, meanwhile, I love telling absurd, Groucho Marx-like tales (forgive the comparison).
FP: In both A Musical Offering and Fireflies, children’s experience of the world is a recurring theme, together with the relationship between the child and the parent—particularly the mother. Unlike Fireflies, however, the new book also includes a number of episodes that refer to events in your own family. What role do family and your own experience play when it comes to your writing?
LS: I have some very magical and musical memories of my childhood. My mother (she’s still alive) plays the piano very well. We would frequently hear her playing classical pieces or children’s music when we were growing up. All that abruptly ended when my brother died, not long after we’d reached adulthood. In my most recent novel, Lenguas vivas, to be published in Spanish this year, this event is one of the principal nodes. As a result, without referring to anyone by name, my personal history is present in it. However, when experiences from my own life appear in my books, it is always by virtue of something greater that contains them. In themselves, they are of no importance to anyone else. On the other hand, isn’t everything we write autobiographical to some extent?
FP: Since you brought it up, can you tell us a little more about your new novel?
LS: In this new book, I try to develop some ideas around the question of what happens when a language becomes extinct, and what happens to language when a loved one dies. I have found some very moving stories about the last women to speak a particular language. There is a very interesting analogy to this phenomenon: the number of lighthouses around the world is about the same as the number of languages spoken. Now, GPS has made lighthouses somewhat redundant, while English threatens to do the same with minor languages.
FP: So, it’s a book that is also about silences, albeit of a different kind. I really hope to have the chance to translate it. It seems to me that in writing about music—and about silence—you are challenging that famous line you yourself have quoted (no one’s sure who first said it): that the act is as absurd as dancing about architecture. Now, if you were to do the opposite and play music about your book, what instrument (or style) would you use?
LS: If I had to choose just one, I’d say the piano (although there are sections where it really has to be a distorted electric guitar, à la Pete Townshend). The music would have to be Baroque, in the style of Art of Fugue. And also the Javanese gamelan, and also . . .
Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator working from Spanish, French, and Italian into English. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM, and now lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the UK Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish.
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