Vadim Jedreyko's 2009 documentary The Woman with Five Elephants reminds us that many excellent films exist out in the great wide world unknown to us (or, at least, unknown to me). The world is rapidly filling up with images. Soon there will be more images in creation that trees on the globe. It's impossible to know about even a tiny percentage of the films that now flood the world. Somehow I missed Jedreyko's film or it missed me.
Svetlana Geier is the titular five-elephant woman. The five elephants are Dostoevsky's five big novels, each about a thousand pages in length. Frau Geier lays claim to the elephants because she has translated them from Russian into German. Jedreyko's documentary is about language, the craft of translation, memory and the horrors of the 20th century. Svetlana Geier's biography encompasses several of Europe's great historical tragedies -- but these enormities are also paralleled by private suffering: in the course of the film, Geier's son, Johannes, a High School shop teacher (it's called "Handicrafts" in the movie) dies as a result of freak accident. Geier, who was 86 when the film was made, is rendered literally speechless with grief. Although she is afloat in an ocean of words in both German and Russian, her son's death, more or less, strikes her dumb. Indeed, at the heart of the film, there lies a concept that certain things are inexpressible: when Geier's much beloved father is returned to his family, a gaunt specter flattened to flesh and bones by torture in the Soviet gulag, he tells his fifteen-year old daughter about what he endured in prison on the condition that she ask him no questions. More than seventy years later, Svetlana says that she has absolutely no memory of what he recounted to her -- she understands that the horror is within her someplace, but, perhaps, mercifully she can't bring it into her conscious mind. Time also erodes and conceals. In the course of the film, Svetlana returns to the Ukraine, where she was born and lived as a girl. But the landmarks are all changed. She can't find her family home and the dacha where she cared for her father until he died, a year after release from the Gulag, has also gone missing. She finds her father's grave in a cemetery but it is covered in snow. When her great-granddaughter offers to clear some of the snow from the marker, the old woman tells her not to bother. But she does ask the girl to pick up a fallen branch so that it can be placed on her mother's grave, apparently back in Freiburg, Germany where she lives.
The documentary begins by showing us Frau Geier at work. She is stooped over, but when she gazes at the camera, we can see that her eyes are bright and penetrating, even flashing with a little malice. (A strength of the film is that we never warm to the old woman -- she's not grandmotherly, but rather prickly, arrogant, and demanding. Her high intelligence is also on display and she's more than a little bit of a show-off -- she taught college students for 40 years, embarking on her career as a professional translator only in her sixties and she has a dramatic, professorial and authoritative way of speaking.) In her old age, Geier is dependant upon the assistance of neighbors. One woman comes every morning with an old Olympic typewriter and takes dictation from her after the two eat several muffins for breakfast. Then, later an old man appears, a retired musician: he reads Geier's recently translated pages aloud to her and criticizes the prose. Geier bickers with both of her helpers, quarreling with them vehemently on the minutiae of spelling, punctuation, and word choice. The film shows her preparing food for her wounded son -- he is confined to some kind of nursing home and she brings him meals every evening. (She says that she learned to prepare food for sick and injured people when her father was dying -- "first, the rehearsal," she says, "then, the main performance.") We see a family gathering in which she supervises the preparation of vast amounts of some sort of filled pastry -- Frau Geier seems to have dozens of industrious granddaughters and great-granddaughters, many of them quite beautiful with pale skin and high Slavic cheekbones. We learn that Geier's father was a prosperous sugar beet farmer in the Ukraine. The family was well-to-do and owned a country house or dacha. Her father was a faithful member of the Communist party until he was purged in 1938, tortured for 18 months and, then, released as a staggering cadaver to his family. With something like perverse pride, Geier says that he was one of a thousand who survived murder inflicted on seven or eight million. Her family was ruined and her mother had to work cleaning houses in Kiev while Svetlana nursed her father until his death. In 1939, the Germans rolled into Kiev and were greeted by many of the people as liberators. Certainly, this was the view of Svetlana and her mother who hated Stalin and his minions. The Germans turned out to be murderous as well. Svetlana recalls a Jewish girlfriend marched from her apartment with her family and led in a long procession to Babi Yar ravine where she was shot with 30,000 others. Nonetheless. Svetlana perceived the Germans as the better of two evils. Her mother sent her to school to learn German as her "dowry" -- the gift of language that would save their lives. Svetlana was a good student and recognized as a prodigy by the German officer whose home her mother was cleaning. The officer, Count Kerssenbrock, proved to be Svetlana's benefactor and procured for her (and her mother) passports to Germany. Geier is asked if she wasn't complicit with the Nazi murder of the Jews and, particularly, whether Kerssenbrock was an accomplice. She says: "the only thing to do was go down to the headquarters with a gun. He didn't do that." After some close calls, Svetlana and her mother reach Freiburg where she marries, has a family and becomes a college teacher. Svetlana's begins translating Dostoevsky in in the early 1990's. Her practice is to study the text until it enters into her. Translating, she says, must be done with the "nose up in the air" -- that is, not with the nose buried in the text. She suggests that you have to look away from the text in order to properly translate, otherwise, she says you are like a "caterpillar crawling from left to right" on the page. She equates Dostoevsky's novels to finely woven and embroidered linen, an art that "no man understands". Her idea that each thread is woven into a tight pattern that has to be imagined and designed before the fabric is made. "Text" and "textile" she says are related words for a reason -- a properly made text is like a lovingly woven fabric -- the film shows us Svetlana luxuriating in beautiful white linens that were made by her mother.
The bulk of the film involves Svetlana's trip to Kiev by train, undertaken when she is 86 with a great-granddaughter. In Kiev, a place she has not seen such 1943, she is a guest speaker in several seminars -- presenting her theories of translation to a largely female group of college students (it appears that translation is women's work in Ukraine) and, then, talking to a class of high school kids. She asks the high school kids to write their names on a sheet of paper so that she can show this to her ailing son -- he was hit in the head by shrapnel from a circular saw that blew apart during a "handicrafts" class that he was teaching. Everything has changed in the Ukraine. Svetlana recognizes one street where there are museums and recalls seeing a painting by Oleg Graber of snow -- "there was not a single stroke of white on the canvas," she recalls with wonder. It's snowy and cold. At one point, Svetlana's great-granddaughter almost slips on ice accumulated under the eaves of an old house. If you're from Minnesota, this very short image is frightening -- probably, people from warmer climates won't even recognize the peril. Returning to Freiburg, Svetlana's paralyzed son dies of his injuries. She says he is laid in his casket "like a baby laid in a cradle." The film ends with her bickering with the old man who reads her translated texts aloud to her: they quarrel over the proper collective noun for a group of horses (some are steeds for riding and others drag coaches and so the question of what the group should be called is problematic). In the film's last shots, Svetlana and the old man argue about whether the punctuation in a sentence should be a period or semi-colon.
There are many remarkable discussions of literature and language itself in the film. Svetlana says that German and Russian are incompatible -- in Russian when you own something, it owns you; that is, the thing you own turns you into its subject. She describes poetically the different sounds that German and Russian words produce and their emotional meaning. She quotes a beetle humming in Pushkin and notes that the words exactly imitate the sound of the insect. She recites Goethe's famous little poem that begins "Ueber alle Gipfeln / ist Ruh"-- quoting the last line, she says that the German word "auch" is like a breath breathed out into the immensity of the silent universe. Cutting an onion, she remarks that the "onion has no center" and that existence is justified only by what it leads us to. Every mystical experience is an inducement to kindness and peace, she says. Language, at least poetry and novels, is the opposite of war and violence, Svetlana tells us. "Sehnsucht" ("yearning") is the most fabulous word, she says. Stacking up her translations from Dostoevsky (they make a pile a yard high), she tells us proudly that "One doesn't translate these things with impunity" -- that is, Man uebersetzt nicht ungestraft. "Ungestraft" means literally "unpunished" and, although I think "impunity" is close to this meaning, it's not exact. I think the translation should be simply "without being punished' or "unpunished."
(Svetlana Geier died in 2011).
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