The Flounder
Günter Grass
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Günter Grass
Dedication
Title Page
Translator’s Note
The First Month
The third breast
What I write about
Nine and more cooks
Awa
How the Flounder was caught
Division of labor
How the Flounder was caught a second time
Dreaming ahead
How the Flounder was prosecuted by the Ilsebills
Meat
Where the stolen fire was briefly hidden
What we lack
Hospitably from horde to horde
Dr. Affectionate
Fed
The wurzel mother
Demeter
What a cast-iron spoon is good for
How I see myself
Oh, Ilsebill
At the end
What I don’t want to remember
The Second Month
How we became city dwellers
Quarrel
Dishwashing
Elaine Migraine
Libber, Libber
Like my Dorothea
Like at the movies
Scania herring
To Ilsebill
My dear Dr. Stachnik
Surplus value
The Third Month
How the Flounder was protected against aggression
When I was her kitchen boy
Vasco returns
Three questions
Too much
Esau says
The last meal
Tarred and feathered
Fat Gret’s ass
Delay
The Flounder’s ideas about nunnish life
Hasenpfeffer
Whoever wants to cook in her footsteps
The cook kisses
The Fourth Month
Inspection of feces
Empty and alone
The burden of an evil day
Turnips and Gänseklein
Why the Flounder tried to rekindle two cold stoves
Late
Fishily on love and poetry
Agnes remembered over boiled fish
It seems his name was Axel
Excrement rhymed
Only one was burned as a witch
Immortal
The Fifth Month
What potato flour is good for (and against)
Told while pounding acorns, plucking geese, peeling potatoes
Plaint and prayer of the farm cook Amanda Woyke
Ole Fritz
Speaking of the weather
How letters were quoted in court
Why potato soup tastes heavenly
Starvation
The Great Leap Forward and the Chinese world food solution
Boiled beef and historical millet
Both
The Sixth Month
Dresses from India
Sophie
The other truth
Beyond the mountains
Gathering mushrooms
Searching for similar mushrooms
Hidden under sorrel
Afraid
Three at table
Nothing but daughters
Continuous generation
The Seventh Month
With Ilsebill, too
Lena dishes out soup
A simple woman
All
Nail and rope
Home-fried potatoes
Bebel’s visit
The trip to Zurich
Where she left her specs
An obituary for Lena
The Eighth Month
Father’s Day
The Ninth Month
Lud
Late
Why she vomited
Vestimentary preoccupations, feminine proportions, last visions
The Womenal
On Møn
Conversation
What we wish for
Man oh man
Three meals of pork and cabbage
Copyright
About the Book
Lifted from their ancient fairytale, the fisherman and his wife are still living today. During the months of Ilsebill’s pregnancy, the fisherman tells her of his adventures through time with the Flounder, constituting a complete reworking of social, political and gastronomic history.
About the Author
Günter Grass (1927–2015) was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.
ALSO BY GÜNTER GRASS
The Tin Drum
Cat and Mouse
Dog Years
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising
Four Plays
Speak Out!
Local Anaesthetic
Max: A Play
From the Diary of a Snail
Inmarypraise
In the Egg and Other Poems
The Call of the Toad
The Meeting at Telgte
Headbirths
Drawings and Words 1954–1977
On Writing and Politics 1967–1983
Etchings and Words 1972–1982
The Rat
Show Your Tongue
Two States – One Nation?
My Century
For Helena Grass
The Flounder
Günter Grass
Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim
Translator’s Note
It must be evident to anyone who has ever fished in the North Atlantic or browsed in a fish market that the fish described here, and eaten here is not what is commonly called a flounder. He’s too big, stout, and pebbly. I call him a flounder because he is no ordinary fish, but an archetypal one, harking back to the dawn of human consciousness but first revealed to the general public in the Grimm Brothers’ tale “The Fisherman and His Wife,” all English translations of which concur in calling the fish (who was really an enchanted prince) a flounder. As is made clear here in the translation with some violence to the original, Günter Grass’s fish is actually a turbot (Steinbutt). The Grimms’ fish, on the other hand, is only a Butt, or flatfish, and the flatfish family includes both Grass’s turbot and our flounder. Moreover, Webster defines “flounder” as “in a broad sense any flatfish,” which puts us perfectly in the clear.
The translation of this book called for a range of knowledge that I cannot lay claim to. I am deeply grateful to the late Wolfgang Sauerlander and to Helen Wolff for their help and advice.
R.M.
The First Month
The third breast
ILSEBILL PUT ON more salt. Before the impregnation there was shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, the season being early October. Still at table, still with her mouth full, she asked, “Should we go to bed right away, or do you first want to tell me how when where our story began?”
I, down through the ages, have been I. And Ilsebill, too, has been from the beginning. I remember our first quarrel, toward the end of the Neolithic, some two thousand years before the incarnation of our Lord, when myths were beginning to distinguish between raw food and cooked food. And just as, today, before sitting down to mutton with string beans and pears, we quarreled more and more cuttingly over her children and mine, so then, in the marshland of the Vistula estuary, we quarreled to the best of our neolithic vocabulary over my claim to at least three of her nine kids. But I lost. For all the ur-phonemes my nimble, hard-working tongue
was able to line up, I did not succeed in forming the beautiful word “father”; only “mother” was possible. In those days Ilsebill’s name was Awa. I, too, had a different name. But the idea of having been Awa doesn’t appeal to Ilsebill.
I had studded the shoulder of mutton with halved garlic cloves, sautéed the pears in butter, and bedded them on boiled string beans. Even though Ilsebill, speaking with her mouth still full, said there was no reason why it shouldn’t come off, or “take,” right away, because she had thrown her pills down the John as the doctor advised, what I heard was that our bed should have priority over the neolithic cook.
And so we lay down, arming and legging each other around as we have done since time immemorial. Sometimes I, sometimes she on top. Equal, though Ilsebill contends that the male’s privilege of penetrating is hardly compensated by the female’s paltry prerogative of refusing admittance. But because we mated in love, our feelings were so all-embracing that in an expanded space, transcending time and its tick-tock, freed from the heaviness of our earthbound bed, a collateral, ethereal union was achieved; as though in compensation, her feeling penetrated mine in hard thrusts: we worked doubly and well.
Eaten before the mutton with pears and beans, Ilsebill’s fish soup, distilled from codfish heads that have had the hell boiled out of them, probably embodied the catalytic agent with which, down through the ages, the cooks inside me have invited pregnancy; for by chance, by destiny, and without further ingredients, it came off, it took. No sooner was I out again—as though expelled—than Ilsebill said with perfect assurance, “Well, this time it’s going to be a boy.”
Don’t forget the savory. With boiled potatoes or, historically, with millet. Our mutton—as always advisable—had been served on warmed plates. Nevertheless our kiss, if I may be forgiven one last indiscretion, was coated with tallow. In the fish soup, which Ilsebill had made green with dill and capers, codfish eyes floated white and signified happiness.
After it presumably came off, we lay in bed together, each smoking his (or her) conception of a cigarette. (I, descending the steps of time, ran away.) Ilsebill said, “Incidentally, we need a dishwasher. It’s high time.”
Before she could engage in further speculation about a reversal of roles—“I wish I could see you pregnant some time”—I told her about Awa and her three breasts.
So help me, Ilsebill, she had three. Nature can do anything. Honest to goodness, three of them. And if my memory doesn’t deceive me, all women had that name in the Stone Age: Awa Awa Awa. And we men were all called Edek. We were all alike in every way. And so were the Awas. One two three. At first we couldn’t count any higher. No, not below, not above; in between. The plural begins with three. Three is the beginning of multiplicity, the series, the chain, and of myth. But don’t let it tie you up in complexes. We acquired some later on. In our region, to the east of the river, Potrimpos, who became a god of the Prussians along with Pikollos and Perkunos, was said to have had three testicles. Yes, you’re right: three breasts are more, or at least they look it; they look like more and more; they suggest superabundance, advertise generosity, give eternal assurance of a full belly. Still, when you come right down to it, they are abnormal—though not inconceivable.
Naturally. A projection of male desires! I knew you’d say that. Maybe they are anatomically impossible. But in those days, when myths still cast their shadows, Awa had three. And it’s true that today the third is often wanting. I mean, something is wanting. Well, the third of the three. Don’t be so quick on the trigger. No, of course not. Of course I won’t make a cult of it. Of course two are plenty. You can take my word for it, Ilsebill, basically I’m satisfied with two. I’m not a fool. I don’t go chasing after a number. Now that, thanks to your fish soup and no pill, it must have come off, now that you’re pregnant and your two will soon weigh more than Awa’s three, I’m perfectly, blissfully contented.
The third was always an extra. Essentially a caprice of capricious nature. As useless as the appendix. Altogether I can’t help wondering: Why this breast fixation? This typically male tittomania? This cry for the primal mother, the super wet-nurse? Anyway, Awa became a goddess later on and had her three tits certified in hand-sized clay idols. Other goddesses—the Indian Kali, for instance—had four or more arms. But these may have served some practical purpose. The Greek mother goddesses—Demeter, Hera—on the other hand, were normally outfitted and managed to stay in business for thousands of years even so. I’ve also seen gods represented with a third eye in their forehead. I wouldn’t want one of those if you paid me.
All in all the number three promises more than it can deliver. Awa overdid it with her three boobies as much as the Amazons underdid it with their one breast. That’s why our latter-day feminists always go to extremes. Get that sulky look off your face. I’m all in favor of the libbers. And I assure you, Ilsebill, two are plenty. Any doctor will tell you so. And if our child doesn’t turn out to be a boy, she’ll certainly have enough with two. What do you mean, aha? Men just happen to be crazy, always this yen for bigger and bigger bosoms. The truth of the matter is that all the cooks I have ever sojourned with have had one on the left and one on the right, the same as you: Mestwina two, Amanda Woyke two, and Sophie Rotzoll had two little espresso cupfuls. And Margarete Rusch the cooking abbess smothered the wealthy patrician Eberhard Ferber in bed with her two admittedly enormous tits. So let’s not exaggerate. The whole thing is kind of a dream. No, not a wish dream. Why must you always pick a fight? Can’t a man dream a little? Can’t he?
Absurd, this jealousy about everything and nothing. A pathetic lot we’d be without projections and utopias! I’d even be forbidden to let pencil stray over white paper in three curved lines. Art would have to say “Yes” and “Have it your way” all the time. I beg you, Ilsebill, be just a little reasonable. Think of the whole thing as an idea with an inherent contradiction which, it is hoped, will give the female breast the dimensions it now lacks and produce some sort of superbosom. You must learn to take a dialectical view. Think of the Roman she-wolf, for instance. Think of expressions such as “nature’s bosom.” Or, with regard to the number, the triune God. Or the three wishes in fairy tales. What do you mean, given myself away? You think I’m wishing? Well, well. You really do?
All right. Admitted that when I grab at empty space, I’m always after the third breast. In which I’m certainly not alone. There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts, as if we’d all been weaned too soon. It must be you women’s fault. It could be your fault. Because you attach so much, too much importance to whether or not they sag a little more, each day a little more. Let them sag, to hell with them. No. Not yours. But they will, they’re bound to, in time. Amanda’s sagged. Lena’s sagged from the start. But I loved her and loved her and loved her. It’s not always a bit of bosom more or less that matters. If I wanted to, for instance, I could find your ass with all its little dimples just as beautiful. And I certainly wouldn’t want it in three parts. Or something else that’s smooth and round. Now that your belly will soon start ballooning, a symbol for everything that’s roomy. Maybe we’ve simply forgotten that there’s still more. A third something. In other respects as well, politically for instance, as possibility.
Anyway, Awa had three. My three-breasted Awa. And you, too, had one more back in the Neolithic. Think back, Ilsebill: to how our story began.
Even if it seems convenient to presume that they, the cooks inside me (nine or eleven of them), are nothing more than a full-blown complex, an extreme case of banal mother fixation, ripe for the couch and hardly worthy of suspending time in kitchen tales, I must nevertheless insist on the rights of my subtenants. All nine or eleven of them want to come out and to be called by name from the very start; because they have too long been nameless old settlers, or, collectively, a complex without name or history; because too often in mute passivity and too seldom with ready words (I say: dominant nevertheless; Ilsebill says: exploited and oppressed) they cooked and performed
various other services for shopkeepers and Teutonic Knights, abbots and inspectors, for men in armor or cowls, in baggy breeches or gaiters, for men in high boots or men with snapping suspenders; and because they want their revenge, revenge against everyone; want at last to be out of me—or, as Ilsebill says, emancipated.
Let them! Let them reduce us all, including the cook inside them—who would doubtless be me—to sex objects. Perhaps from exhausted daddies they will build a man who, untainted by power and privilege, will be sticky and new; for without him it can’t be done.
“Not yet, unfortunately,” said Ilsebill as we were spooning up our fish soup. And after the shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, she gave me nine months’ time to deliver myself of my cooks. When it comes to deadlines, we have equal rights. Whatever I may have cooked, the cook inside me adds salt.
What I write about
About food and its aftertaste.
Then about guests who came
uninvited or just a century late.
About the mackerel’s longing for lemon juice.
Among fishes I write mostly about the flounder.
I write about superabundance.
About fasting and why gluttons invented it.
About crusts from the tables of the rich and their food value.
About fat and excrement and salt and penury.
In the midst of a mound of millet
I will relate instructively
how the spirit became bitter as gall
and the belly went insane.
I write about breasts.
About Ilsebill’s pregnancy (her craving for sour pickles)
I will write as long as it lasts.
About the last bite shared,
the hour spent with a friend
over bread, cheese, nuts, and wine.
(Munching, we talked about this, that, and the other
and about gluttony, which is only a form of fear.)
I write about hunger, how it is described
and disseminated by the written word.
About spices (when Vasco da Gama and I
made pepper cheaper)
I will write on my way to Calcutta.
