IN THE WAKE OF THE WAKE: The Calf by Leif Høghaug - Translated by David M. Smith

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This episode of Leaf by Leaf is sponsored by Zero Gravity Press. What kind of dreams would someone have if they spent years of their life immersed in the longest, most complex dream in English literature? Well, one such person has committed their dream to paper for the rest of us.

[00:00:22]>> [music] [music] >> Hey everybody, thank you so much as always for watching Leaf by Leaf. My name is Chris and I am thrilled with the fact that I can't stop reading. One of the things I like to explore when I'm reading a book is how that book is operating on my mind. One of many things that I'm thinking about when I'm reading a book, but this is sort of the aftereffect or the residue of the reading. I like to pay attention to what happens when I live with a book for a while. How it subtly alters my perception and rearranges my thoughts. And I'd say most importantly for the best books out there, how the book resists being finished. Today, I'm responding to The Calf by Life Herghaug, translated by David M. Smith and published by Fúm de Estampa Press and Deep Vellum. This one digs into that permeability between waking and dreaming and creates a space where things are sort of casually distorted as in a Picasso. That cubism where objects are rendered down into their geometrical shapes. I note the recurrence of cubes and spheres in particular and how things are shown from multiple perspectives at once. Of course, the difference between the artwork of a Picasso cubism and a book is that the book can't really depict that simultaneity at quite the same level. There is a Sisyphian time loop of sharpening pencils and brewing coffee superimposed on a counterclockwise late summer night's dream with a downward plunging elevator ride bisecting these antipodal time directions, which sort of asserts this schism of the present tense where time has run out. A sky scraping hourglass done emptied clean down to the bottom.

[00:02:56]As alluded to, this book was born out of a translator's efforts at putting Finnegans Wake no less into a regional Norwegian dialect. And now it's available in English thanks to David M.

[00:03:10]Smith. So, it's a translation of a work that came out of the act of translation performed on a book that is in many ways an exaltation of translation. It is thus a tale of two translators or perhaps three where the resulting spectacle is what Geraldo de Campos called transcreation and the ghost hand of Joyce presides over this far-flung creative progeny. As you might have heard when I read that small little excerpt, in order to capture the strangeness of the way this original Norwegian dialect would look to most of its primary readers, the strangeness of the way it looks and the way it sounds, David M. Smith chose for its American English audience to use that regional dialect of Southern Appalachia. And I know I done already had the thought that the man husk is all stretched out mechanical barn gnome is a sleeping and a snoring and a dreaming. Dreaming that he's a setting in a little cranny nook somewhere abouts in the mazy office landscape and inside of that dream, a dream about a late summer night. And inside of that dream, a daydream. That's right, a daydream inside of the late summer night's dream inside of the war out metal wash tub noggin inside the mazy office landscape down in the underworld. What this does is it creates some earworms that really, at least for me, I can't unhear. The force of the language comes through from its original even in its transposition into what could be a silly Yosemite Sam-like what in tarnation type accent for readers.

[00:05:02]But one of the primary earworms of this book's disruptive dialects comes early on. In fact, in the first paragraph.

[00:05:11]These past few days I've been thinking and thinking about a late summer night I tried a long time to forget. As I setting here thinking and a writing and soon enough you like to realize that everything I is a thinking and a writing. No, it's these voices, man.

[00:05:28]It's these chain tooth voices way down inside this old war out metal wash tub noggin of mine. It's them what's talking and talking, churning and rattling. On and on they go. And maybe that earworm caught you, too. And will start cycling around inside, but those old chain tooth voices way down inside. It appears right there on that first page and then like most elements in this book, repeats throughout. There's a a circularity or or a spherism as I might call it. But it got me thinking for me, what are my chain tooth voices from the way back when? What are the chain tooth voices that echo in my head, especially as I progress into a more repetitious reality, a more repetitious phase of my life. What are the chain tooth voices that echo inside your head? What are the chain tooth voices in your present that you sort of suspect will echo in your mind when you're looking back on this way back when? Even books, books like The Calf, they have their own chain tooth voices. Joyce of course here, but also Lewis Carroll, Melville, the Old Testament, and Norwegian folklore.

[00:06:49]Perhaps because of this snagged, snarling chatter of chain tooth voices, our personal chain tooth voices, there is a compulsion for us to get them out on paper, to tell the story of who we are by thinking of who we were. And this act of listening is an act of remembering. And remembering is always essentially the act of translating. And certainly the act of writing is always thus an act of translation even if you're staying in the same language. And I is writing it all down, writing down what I remember, how I remember it as I remember it. The more I think about it, so much of our lives is an act of translation. The Calf then, as I experienced it and continue to experience it, is a wonderful dreamscape of language and literature that mixes memory and desire and ultimately achieves its freedom through constraint.

[00:07:57]That that paradox of achieving freedom through the right constraints. And it's littered with subtle reversals that hinge on the way we think about time.

[00:08:11]Perhaps Herghaug's cleverest move is that like Joyce's Wake again, Herghaug's vision opens with a fall if not the fall. Yet, The Calf ends with the hope of an apple.