Cow Read online

  COW

  Beat Sterchi

  Translated from the German

  by Michael Hofmann

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Cow

  Cow is the story of a Spanish agricultural labourer, Ambrosio, who goes to Switzerland as a Gastarbeiter. He is bound for Innenwald, a village in the Swiss highlands, and the novel begins as he is about to spend a summer working for Farmer Knuchel. It ends in the abattoir of the neighbouring city, at the end of the seven hard years of labour that have destroyed him. There he sees Blösch, the once magnificent lead cow on Knuchel’s farm, now a sad, condemned creature in the abattoir.

  Cow was acclaimed as a contemporary classic on first publication. Now more than ever it must be read as a damning indictment of the relationship between humans and the animal world.

  Introduction by Eileen Battersby.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Cow

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Authors

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  ...if ever their byres brought forth a calf

  of a sheer and unbrindled red, they would

  give it the name ‘Blösch’ for its straw-red hide.

  FOREWORD

  OVER CHRISTMAS OF 1983, I was asked to look at a German book and give an opinion as to whether it was worth publishing in English. It was a first novel, Blösch, by Beat Sterchi (neither name meant anything to me), and it and he were actually Swiss. On the cover was a photograph of a hulking, rather uncommunicative-looking farmhouse and out-buildings (no smoke, no people, no windows), and, on the back, the author, a lumberjack-looking fellow with tangle of hair and beard and sad eyes. The book was over 400 pages long, and was named after its principal character, a red cow – ‘Blösch’ is cognate with the English ‘blush’. It had a three-page glossary of Swiss terms at the end, and I thought something along the lines of ‘ho-hum’.

  A few days later, gripped and shaken and in no doubt that I had read a masterpiece, I covered several pages with my report, including, from memory, the sentence ‘I doubt whether you will be offered a better book from the German in the next eight or ten years.’ With hindsight, it was the merest understatement, though I was desperately trying to stick my neck out. A month or two afterwards, I learned that some other people had read and admired the book as well, that the publisher – Faber – had duly bought it, and that, I supposed, was that. I felt like a cog in a satisfactorily working machine. The thing was underway, and I had done my bit.

  It wasn’t quite that straightforward. The thing, for some reason, hung around. From time to time I rang the publisher for news on ‘the Swiss novel’, and there wasn’t any. Faber hadn’t originated any books from the German, not for a long time, and kept no tabs on German translators – or perhaps potential translators took fright at this industrial epic set on a dairy farm and an abattoir, about the cow, Blösch, and the Spanish Gastarbeiter, Ambrosio, about milk and about blood. I wasn’t interested myself, because I thought of myself, a poet and reviewer and only occasional translator, as working at the more delicate end of things. In any case, I hadn’t done much of anything. I would be squashed flat by a book like Blösch.

  Still, I felt sorry for the author who had sold his book – years ago now – to a renowned English publisher, but was apparently no nearer to seeing it in print. If the book was as good as I’d said it was, why didn’t I translate it – even though I could imagine no one less qualified to do so? Then again, the one qualification I did have was admiration. In the end, my certainty about the book prevailed over my doubts about myself.

  Through 1986 and 1987, I made my way through the book. Sterchi kindly shipped me some of his (English language) materials and drew me the odd diagram. I went to visit him in the old village house somewhere near Valencia where he had (beautifully, in terms of the cosmos) gone to live. I did various minor bits of research, kept a finger in the ‘cow’ entry of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, read Upton Sinclair’s Chicago stockyard novel, The Jungle, but largely trusted to what was in front of me. When I was done, I thought I understood enough in theory to slaughter an animal myself. Perhaps more to the point, it’s the book that made me a translator.

  Translation, by its nature, tends to abstract and to distance. Something that was once, at least potentially, experienced and lived becomes second-hand. Countervailing notions like method translating or Author Heritage Tours for translators seem both hopeless and demeaning. I had the distressing sense of having taken a book that was made out of blood and bone and milk and, for all my best endeavours, made it into one of words.

  But I could also see that I was inclined to over-estimate the experienced side of the book – because that was what I couldn’t match – against its literary side: and this was after all a book that borrows its first sentence from Marquez, its techniques of catechism and multiple dialogue from Döblin and Joyce, whose most obvious antecedent was Moby-Dick, and whose language sent me back to Macbeth, to the mediaeval hunting scenes in Gawain, or to the Chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone: ‘Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.’

  When it came to getting the book out, I was in a hurry. It was fully five years since the German edition, and I didn’t want to waste any more time. The earliest possible date was a Monday in October, 1988; some voices counselled against, suggested waiting till the umbrageous month of January, but I was full of the book and unafraid of anything. The shortlist for the Booker Prize was announced that day? Well, let it! I thought Blösch would see off ‘the native competition’. I couldn’t imagine the reader who would fail to be knocked out by it.

  What happened was perfectly predictable to everyone, except me. First with the Booker hoo-hah, then with the run-up to Christmas, Blösch barely got a look-in. I was too green or too proud to have solicited blurbs from Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes – such an obvious thing to do. (Many years later, I had them, but what good were they then. Also, I quite failed to anticipate the effect of three such unfamiliar vocables as Blösch, Beat and Sterchi on the cover.)

  The alien book sold a couple of hundred copies. In the New Year, I chased around and managed to drum up a few more reviews, but, by then, it was too late. It wasn’t in the shops, except in remainder stores, where there were little piles of it marked down to £1.99. There was no time for word of mouth to take effect (though I think it is a book that people talked about). There was – I think uniquely for a Faber novel in the 1980s – no paperback; the sales ‘didn’t justify’ one.

  Incredibly, its publication in the US was similarly blighted: the day it came out there (in 1990) was the day the remaining staff of Andre Schiffrin’s ‘old’ Pantheon took their hats, in solidarity with their boss, who had been sacked. A foolish and ill-natured review in the New York Times did the rest. Essentially, the book was twice stymied by the rhythms and dynamics of publishing – the industry that makes and sells books.

  The world is full of hard-luck stories. What makes Blösch – or now, belatedly, Cow – worth talking about is, firstly, its own uncompromising magnificence as a work of art, and secondly, the – unpredicted and unpredictably unhelpful – topicality of its subject. In all the decades of its unavailability, there was hardly a day when the news
papers didn’t carry a story about meat, about beef, about health, about the interconnected lives of human beings and domestic cattle, about hormones and antibiotics, about the ominous initials BSE, CJD and the rest of them. To this, one could now add global warming, and doubts about the advisability and sustainability of animal husbandry.

  All this is anticipated, contextualized, made sense of, sung, you could almost say, in Cow. One particular Saturday, I remember a gruesomely beautiful photograph in the Independent of smoke and charred, angular limbs; just as all flesh is grass, it seemed to say, so all bone is wood. It was of cattle being incinerated, the very act and image (spoiler alert!) that Cow ends with. Throughout this time, I’ve often thought more about Moby-Dick, published in 1851, ‘a book about a whale,’ not many takers. Then I thought: what if the 1850s and 60s had experienced a tremendous upsurge of interest in whales... You get the point. If the new edition of Cow stays on the shelf, one would have to conclude that people do their serious reading online, in blogs and tweets, and that the time for novels ambitious enough to want to provoke them to think about the world and their lives is that much nearer to being past.

  MICHAEL HOFMANN

  INTRODUCTION

  A DAIRY COW is so familiar an entity to everyone, even to the town dweller. It is an ordinary image, always benign and reassuring and yet also, potentially, profound. Its fate is inevitable. Summoning the fury of a Greek tragedy and the human comedy of Balzac, combined with the visceral passion of Ted Hughes, this novel is an epic like no other, one that will beguile and provoke, sufficiently urgent to shake our complacency, and, perhaps ultimately, to test our humanity.

  The story begins with the arrival of a Spanish agricultural gastarbeiter (a labourer) in Innerwald, a tiny Swiss mountain village. It is an airtight community with little tolerance for foreigners in need of employment. The stranger causes an immediate reaction and not only because he is wearing shorts and sandals:

  A dozen or so Innerwalders, who had just been busy with cans and basins in front of the communal cheese dairy, shouting instructions to horses and dog teams, laughing and bragging, suddenly fell silent, dropped their work and stared at the newcomer standing in the middle of their – [note the use of the possessive pronoun ‘their’] – village square on show like a fish on a hook.

  Ambrosio is small, balding, inoffensive and eager to work. He is also married, speaks not a word of German and prepares to abide by the rules of Knuchel, a likeable, and fastidious traditionalist apparently devoted to his small herd of twelve cows, led by the magnificent Blösch, mother of many bull calves, if, sadly, never a heifer to pass on her sublime legacy.

  Domineering by nature, she presides over the cattle shed and calmly snatches her neighbour’s feed. Blösch is the ruling presence, and possessed of an intimidating sexuality. Indeed she is a red cow like no other, a force of nature, and the living affirmation of Knuchel’s mastery of his chosen vocation. He likes to pamper his ‘girls’; they even wear elaborate brass bells around their necks and enjoy the sweet pasture on the hill-side when the weather is fine, no filthy slab unit for them. Milking at his farm is done manually, not by the dreaded new machines.

  Through the simplest of plots, centering on a timid outsider and a bossy ruminant in a village – the hamlet’s very name implying the introverted nature of its inhabitants – the enigmatic Swiss writer Beat Sterchi has created an atmospheric and devastating narrative which probes to the very essence of human existence and how we treat domesticated animals bred for consumption. It took a poet, Seamus Heaney, to grasp this book’s elemental grandeur. Hailing it as ‘extraordinary’, he referred to the ‘powerful tragic-comic sense of the reek and frenzy of the yard-worker’s world. The book is a kind of de profundis of the cattle-shed.’

  Once read, Cow becomes, and remains, unforgettable; a true-to-life cautionary tale which lives on in the heart and imagination, and most emphatically, the conscience. Anyone doubting the significance of fiction might well revise their opinion on reading this book, one of the most important novels of twentieth-century German-language literature.

  Although Ambrosio quickly settles into his new routine on the farm, listening to the mysterious thuds he hears in the house at night, playing with the farmer’s children and instinctively under-standing the contrasting personalities of the various milkers, the sniping villagers fester with barely-repressed hostility, resentful of the money he earns. They keep him in his place. Foreigners are not welcome, particularly if a local could do the same work, if they so wished. But that’s not the point – he is an outsider and unwelcome. There is an arrogant complacency about the inhabitants of Innerwald. Sterchi’s subtle feel for characterisation is among the stylistic triumphs of the book; Ambrosio is relegated to the status of a child, not because of his diminutive frame but because he can’t speak the German language.

  What could have been an atmospheric portrait of daily life amid the petty tensions of a rural community, juxtaposed with the happier domestic universe of a family farm upon which the old ways are cherished, acquires far darker resonances when the scene flashes forward seven years.

  Ambrosio has stayed on in Innerwald, but he is no longer working on Knuchel’s idyllic haven. Near the beginning of his time there the farmer had ordered Ambrosio to remove his wedding ring when milking as it might accidently hurt a cow’s teat. Various remarks about the little Spaniard’s lack of a doctor’s certificate and random complaints about him not being a local have achieved their objective and forced him to seek a job in a slaughterhouse. The abattoir is staffed by an odd assortment of characters who specialise in specific aspects of the gruesome process of killing and processing. Each choreographed activity culminates in the dismantling of a hapless animal as the various body parts are harvested with relentless efficiency.

  The writing in the abattoir sequences is graphically detailed, at times grotesque; methodical and violent. The victims are not automobiles in a breaker’s yard; these are living creatures experiencing fear and pain. It recalls the English artist George Stubbs (1724–1806) famously studying the corpses of horses he had purchased and slaughtered personally in order to examine their muscular structure. Understanding anatomy would, he felt, help him replicate an authentic sense of movement on canvas. There are echoes in Cow of Moby-Dick (1851) and of the stark social realist narrative of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). The descriptions also recall the vile Chicago meat-packing plants that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle (1906). It could be conceded that any novel set partly in a slaughterhouse might appear to have a limited appeal. But this elegiac masterpiece defies casual dismissal. The plight of the helpless, panicked animals is distressing, yet Sterchi delves far deeper; he is exposing man’s inherent propensity for cruelty and the lack of humanity evident in genocide, or mass killing on any scale. The terrorized cattle huddling in narrow passageways only too clearly, and disturbingly, evoke the final moments of the victims in the Nazi death camps.

  What occurs in the abattoir becomes a metaphor for all evil, exploring power in its many guises. The slaughterhouse could as easily be a concentration camp and it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to separate the two, which may well be Sterchi’s intention.

  *

  First published in German in 1983, and then five years later in this, Michael Hofmann’s astutely-nuanced translation, Sterchi’s only novel has always had something of a cult following. Agriculture has changed radically in the decades since he wrote the book, as have attitudes to food production. The treatment of cattle, sheep and pigs as well as rabbits and battery hens, remains at the centre of a moral and ethical debate which has been even further heightened by the plight of horses which are also slaughtered in large numbers despite not being bred or licensed for consumption (at least in Britain or Ireland).

  The production of meat has long been highly contentious, divisive and deeply political. But, ironically, it was the revelation that horses were also part of the meat-processing scandal that caused
a public outcry once it was known that about 250,000 horses are slaughtered for meat across Europe every year. Almost 50 per cent of that figure is slaughtered in Italy and Spain; but many of those animals originate elsewhere. An estimated 60,000 horses are transported live annually from Poland to Italy for slaughter – four days of hell in cramped containers which are frequently opened to reveal injured, often dead, animals that have slipped or been crushed during transit.

  A mere three years after the German publication of Cow, an American thoroughbred named Ferdinand, a three-year-old son of the mighty Nijinsky, and grandson of Northern Dancer, won the Kentucky Derby, and the following year in thrilling style he took the 1987 Breeder’s Cup in a photo finish. Loud was the cheering: another champion from the greatest bloodline in racing history.

  Ferdinand was subsequently sold to stud in Japan. News broke in 2002 that he had been slaughtered at the age of nineteen for pet food. Japanese authorities confirmed that all retired horses in that country are disposed of in this way. The horrific death of a great horse incited a protest in the US and across the globe, including Australia, where horses are known to be shot dead in open pens while their fellow victims panic, awaiting their turn. The slaughter of horses in the United States is banned, so more than 100,000 American horses are transported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter. The Trump administration’s budget cuts, in 2017, will affect the estimated 100,000 wild horses that are protected by law as symbols of the West. The message is clear: more horses will enter the food chain as ranchers, resenting the federal aid given to the protected wild horses, round up many of them and sell them for slaughter. Cow appears shockingly of the moment because its author was years ahead of his time.

  Beat Sterchi was born in 1949 in Bern, Switzerland, the son of a butcher. He followed his father into the meat industry, hence the precise detail of his descriptions, and probably the residual trauma deep in his psyche. The men in the slaughter-house labour in blood, severed flesh, bone and the cries of the desperate and the dying. Throughout the narrative there is a constant tension between the old ways and the increasingly industrialised methods of modern meat production.