Many mules on the road
“Proza dat aangeraakt is door de dichtkunst”
In Of Mice and Men en Homage to Catalonia fungeren muildieren als trekdieren. Maar in A Farewell to Arms zijn het lastdieren, pakdieren: ze vervoeren munitiekisten naar het front in de Dolomieten, waar Italiaanse en Oostenrijkse troepen tegenover elkaar staan. De Eerste Wereldoorlog. Hemingway, 18 jaar oud, had zich als ambulancechauffeur aangemeld bij het Amerikaanse Rode Kruis en deed zijn werk aan de kant van de Italianen. Al na een paar weken raakte hij gewond door mortiervuur en moest maandenlang in een ziekenhuis worden verpleegd. Zijn ervaringen heeft hij verwerkt in A Farewell to Arms. Hieruit het eerste hoofdstuk.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.
Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not succesful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.
There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.Remco Campert is een bewonderaar van Hemingway. Jaren geleden, in zijn column in de Volkskrant, schreef hij dat de tekst van de eerste alinea van A Farewell to Arms in zijn werkkamer hing en dat hij die had vertaald (of zoals hijzelf zei: had proberen te vertalen).
Laat in de zomer van dat jaar woonden we in een huis in een dorp dat voorbij de rivier en de vlakte uitkeek op de bergen. In de bedding van de rivier lagen kiezelstenen en keien, droog en wit in de zon, en het water was helder en stroomde snel en blauw in zijn geul. Troepen gingen langs het huis en over de weg en het stof dat ze opwierpen bedekte de bladeren van de bomen. Ook de stammen van de bomen waren stoffig en de bladeren vielen dat jaar vroeg en we zagen de troepen over de weg marcheren en het stof opstuiven en de bladeren, door een bries bewogen, vallen en de soldaten voorbijtrekken en later de weg kaal en wit, op de bladeren na.
“Proza dat aangeraakt is door de dichtkunst”, schrijft Campert.
Referenties
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929.
Remco Campert, Vandaag ben ik een lege kartonnen doos, 2015.
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Geplaatst op 24 augustus 2020.
© de 5e Verdieping 2020